


wild geese

by theheartischill



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Depression, Eventual Happy Ending, Feelings, Fix-It of Sorts, Kissing, M/M, Mental Health Issues, thematically relevant magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2020-01-03
Packaged: 2021-02-26 17:21:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 55,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21942031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theheartischill/pseuds/theheartischill
Summary: "If I were to speculate, I would suspect that it is not only the body which is subject to decay. Whatever transpires beyond the point you crossed, it likely necessitates a kind of spiritual apoptosis—the parts of you equipped for this world wither or die off to prepare you fully for the next. Your friends restored your body—that’s the easy part. The regrowth of pieces which were in the process of accepting their own obliteration—that will take time. Or so I should think.”“Oh,” Quentin said. “But you think—you think they can grow back?”(Or: in which Julia has an idea, Quentin attempts to recuperate, and the path back to the self is rarely so linear as we would prefer.)
Relationships: Quentin Coldwater & Julia Wicker, Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh
Comments: 93
Kudos: 287





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> (1) This is a fix-it fic, more or less, in that it takes Quentin's death in 4x13 as canonical and by the time of the story's start undone.
> 
> (2) I know I tagged for depression & mental health issues, but I want to issue a specific **content note for depression.** This fic spends a number of extended periods of time in a very depressed headspace. There is also a more focused note for suicidal ideation in the fifth section of Chapter 2 (fourth to fifth asterisk) and the second section of Chapter 4 (first to second asterisk). It's all in my interpretation extremely canon-typical, and there are also light bits and soft bits and an unambiguously happy ending! But, you know, be safe. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me [on Tumblr](http://prettyboysdontlookatexplosions.tumblr.com); if you don't feel comfortable asking publicly, drop your email address and I'll get in touch.

It had been six months since his resurrection and the leaves at Brakebills were just starting to fade golden around their edges when Julia sat at the foot of his bed and said gently, “I had an idea.”

Before she had knocked lightly on his door frame Quentin had been doing nothing. That was what Quentin did these days, mostly: nothing at Brakebills, and occasionally nothing in Fillory, hours spent staring at the empty whiteness of a wall and saying nothing, or sitting by a meal someone else had procured for him which had long grown cold eating nothing, or if he were feeling particularly person-like walking nowhere for hours, thinking of nothing. Sometimes the blankness of his days was such that when he fell asleep he dreamed he was back in residential treatment at Columbia-Presbyterian, doing art therapy across the table from a young adult novelist of some renown who preferred to make long beaded necklaces in intricate mathematical patterns, and when he woke up uncertainty lingered as to whether in fact he might be there, under the largesse of some mysterious benefactor who had sprung for an unusually luxurious room. When this happened he had a trick for realigning himself with reality. He would get out of bed and poke around the room for shoelaces, pens, toothpicks, any of the objects such institutions confiscated on entry for their potential in particularly creative or desperate hands to bring harm to self or others. Once he had identified a few of these in plain sight, where any night-shift nurse would easily have spotted them, he would return to bed, satisfied. After the first few of these dreams he had stockpiled a small group of such items in the drawer in his nightstand. Sometimes he opened it up in the middle of the day just to look at them, for reasons he could not articulate to himself. Perhaps it brought him comfort to see the only tangible outcome he had effected in his time back among the living.

“What’s—” he started to say, voice croaking; he paused, swallowed, tried again. “What was your idea?”

“I think,” she said, “you should come stay with me in the city for a while.”

He heard the words and tried to hold onto them long enough to respond but his brain would not cooperate. His brain was looking at the trees and remembering when he had first come to the campus as an admitted student, an event which existed in his memory somewhere between three years and several lifetimes ago, distant less because of everything that had happened since and more because of how unrecognizable the Quentin of his past seemed to him now. He felt often he could almost see that version of himself spectrally, a child so convinced he was finally an adult, clutching his messenger bag and drinking in everything like some wide-eyed tourist blocking pedestrians in Times Square. How excited he had been. His idiotic hopefulness. If he thought about it too long he wanted to punch the wall until his knuckles bled, the loathsome certainty he could still with a rush of humiliation recall that this, _this_ , would be _it_ , would be deliverance from the hideous morass of his personality, the place in which he, Quentin, could finally belong, be the person he had always been meant to be, be perhaps even happy—

“No one’s going to force you anywhere you don’t want to go,” Julia was saying, “least of all me. I just feel like—”

“When can we leave?” he asked.

She started, then smiled the same smile of quiet efficient competence he remembered from nights spent putting the finishing touches on their matching Halloween costumes. “Let’s get you packed.”

*

In his first days back, shortly after he had regained the capacity for speech, he had gone to see Dean Fogg, or Dean Fogg had requested a meeting, or someone else had suggested that the two of them talk. The organizing logistics of his life were then especially unclear to him.

“Like so very, very many of the things your clique has forced me to deal with,” Fogg had said, “your situation is unprecedented. So far as I can tell there are no records of someone being brought back from where you were brought back from.”

“We’re not a clique,” Quentin had said.

Fogg raised an eyebrow. “Ask Todd what he thinks of that.”

“I don’t, um—” he started. “I don’t feel like—I don’t feel much of anything, really, and I’m actually not worried about that, but I know I should be worried, and, um. Because I kind of get the sense that, that this is what it feels like maybe if you’ve been severed from your Shade, and, and in the timeline where Alice brought me back without mine, I, well. You were there.”

“I was,” Fogg agreed. “Are you feeling particularly ruthless? Perhaps murderously so? Have you been experiencing an all-consuming desire for power so intense you would without a second thought snap the neck of the people who fetched you back from the dead?”

“No—I mean I don’t think so, I mean—” He shook his head. “No, I don’t want that. I don’t want—anything, really.” He thought about Alice kissing him the day before and how he had sat there aware that in the past his body had moved in response to this movement. _I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have_ — she’d said, and he’d said _It’s okay,_ and she had tried to smile at him while he tried to smile at her. In the absence of the ability he knew he had once had to offer words or gestures of comfort it had seemed most polite to pretend he didn’t notice she was crying.

“Then I doubt you need worry about becoming what you fear becoming.” Fogg tilted his head. Quentin could feel lightly at his own edges Fogg’s exploratory magical gaze, lightly investigating the contours of his extraphysical nature. “As I said, there’s nothing established to go on, here. But if I were to speculate I would suspect that it is not only the body which is subject to decay. Whatever transpires beyond the point you crossed, it likely necessitates a kind of spiritual apoptosis—the parts of you equipped for this world wither or die off to prepare you fully for the next. Your friends restored your body—that’s the easy part. The regrowth of pieces which were in the process of accepting their own obliteration—that will take time. Or so I should think.”

“Oh,” Quentin said. He wondered if at some future point he would think back to this conversation with despair. “But you think—you think they can grow back?”

“Honestly?” Fogg waited, like this was a real question, and Quentin gave a slight nod. “Abstractly, I have no idea. But when I met you I never would have thought you’d be able to pull off half the shit you’ve done. So I’ve given up trying to make predictions on the topic.”

“When you first met me,” Quentin said, trying to parse the meaning, “in the first time loop, you mean. Quentin One, or whatever.”

Fogg smiled. “When I first met you thirty-nine lifetimes in, at the start of this one.” He stood up, straightening his jacket. “I’m teaching a seminar in ten minutes, and I’m not doing it without more coffee. But you should know that given your... service—you have a place to stay at Brakebills as long as you want it.”

*

He had not wanted to stay at Brakebills then; he had not wanted anything. He did not now particularly want to stay in the Wicker family property on Central Park West, but he did after half a year’s time wish to leave the school. The pieces of himself which had begun to reappear there were all intermixed with the despair of shattered promises, and while this was in his life a kind of motif it nonetheless seemed worthwhile to flee somewhere his wounds were less raw.

It didn’t take long for Julia to charm his few possessions into a suitcase. When she was done she asked, “Not that you’re leaving forever, but—do you want to say goodbye to people?”

He shook his head, feeling guilty but no guiltier than he felt every time he thought of the others, who had risked a great deal to bring back a friend and had received so far basically an apathetic golem which could not care for itself or make conversation. Being around them reminded him of what a lousy return on investment he was. Only Julia, who had known him without magic and seen him in not dissimilar straits, eased the pangs a bit, until he remembered to notice the discrepancy and felt guilty for it.

“Okay,” she said, and made a subtle motion with her fingertips. Some kind of messaging spell, he noted, and realized that she must have discussed this with them, probably at length, they must have sat around gaming out the ways he might respond and—his throat tightened.

As they walked past the wards a tension he hadn’t realized he’d been holding for six months lessened through his shoulders. “Oh shit,” he breathed. It was something like walking out of a waterfall into the sea: he could still feel the magic, but it moved easier, without constriction. He had never noticed before, how constricted its flow was at the school.

“Yeah,” Julia said. “It’s weird what you get used to, right?”

Quentin nodded, breathing in and breathing again.

“I thought about setting up a portal, or something,” Julia said. “But then I thought—I don’t know, the leaves are really pretty right now, it might be nice to walk into town and take the train. To remember how we used to get around, before—everything. And just let the magic be. If you want.”

There were still few things he wanted. But given a moment to reflect he liked this idea: to sit with the magic and the motion of the car and the streaks of autumn through the window, and no sense that anyone was secretly waiting for him to fulfill a task he could not understand or carry out. To ride the train with his best friend like they were high school seniors heading to New Haven or Cambridge for college visits, in the giddy last few months before what would wind up being another abortive beginning. “Okay.”

*

He had given himself a month before telling Alice, “I don’t think I can really be a boyfriend right now.”

She’d nodded, eyes glistening, mouth tight. “Of course, um. I’d be—I’d be a pretty big hypocrite if I didn’t understand.”

“I don’t—” And he had hesitated here, because it seemed cruel to make a decision like this while he had so few preferences in any direction; but it seemed crueler, or at least more wrong, to allow Alice, _Alice_ , to believe she deserved to stick around for someone’s indifference out of some sense of obligation, so he said, “I don’t think you should wait for me. I don’t, I don’t know how long it’s going to be until I—or what that even is going to look like, and I just think, you shouldn’t—I’m sorry.”

She took a long shaky breath and he looked at her beautiful face and her long shining hair and wondered if he would ever again be that person who once had occasionally been able to ease the constant furrow of concern between her brows, even for a little while. “Okay,” she said, “okay, and don’t—don’t be sorry, I’m just—I really am just so happy you’re alive.” She wiped her eyes, trying to smile for him.

She didn’t look happy, but he didn’t think he could help that. He wondered what she had looked like when they’d gotten back together, before. It seemed expected enough that he had no memory of his time in death beyond a few dream-like fragments ( _You didn’t want to leave all this, did you?_ —had he said that, or heard it? And what had it meant, or had it meant anything?), but it struck him as strange that he remembered nothing of the days leading up to it, nothing past his oddly grayed-out recollection of their last trip to Brakebills South. Like a textbook example from intro psych of retrograde amnesia following a severe head injury, which he supposed was an understated way of describing what had happened. Quentin found it disorienting, like he had lost not only memories but the whole self who had made such monumental decisions. He couldn’t remember him or why or how he had done any of it: that person who had reunited with Alice, and saved Eliot’s life, and defeated a god, and chosen to die.

*

Quentin didn’t know if it helped but he could recognize within a few days that it changed something, at least, to be away from the site of so much personal catastrophe and in a place where magic floated freely as air. He never used to be so sensitive to the particularities of magic’s flow but he supposed it would be stranger had he emerged with no permanent alterations from the place he left. In Manhattan it became easier to attend to his surroundings: the tiny black and white tiles of the vestibule, the apartment’s hardwood floors and the bay window in the living room, the ornate pattern of vines and leaves on the rug in the room in which he slept. He found himself running his fingers against its rough texture as if through touch to wear down some inarticulable barrier between himself and the world, then stopped, feeling stupid. But the rug felt a little more real after that, like the bed with its fine white cotton sheets felt a little realer every time he woke up in it, like he had landed in a place on which he was permitted to exert a claim of presence.

Julia made them risotto and he tried not to think about the thousand other things Julia could be doing, with her tremendous magical facility or her intelligence or the sheer force of that will which bowed to nothing, other than making risotto for her undead best friend who it certainly seemed likely would never be capable of making risotto or doing anything else ever again. Although he had not felt hunger once since coming back he made an effort to eat it, because he didn’t want her time to be wasted and because he could tell from the way people had been looking at him that he was veering toward and perhaps had crossed the line into what would be called _alarmingly thin_.

“How is it?” Julia asked, watching him pick at his bowl. “I found the recipe online, but I made a couple of tweaks.”

“It’s good,” he said. In truth he could barely taste it, but he trusted her in cooking as in everything else. “I—you shouldn’t take it personally, if I don’t eat much. I haven’t exactly—it’s like my body hasn’t really remembered how to be hungry, or something. How to—” _How to be alive_ , he didn’t say.

“Huh.” Julia took a sip from her glass of red wine. “You haven’t really talked about—what it feels like, now. When we did what we did, we thought—none of us expected it to be a smooth transition. I guess we didn’t really know what to expect.”

“Oh.” Quentin didn’t like to think about how much they had gambled, or what for.

“You don’t have to,” she assured him, “it’s—”

“No, it’s—fine,” he said, “it’s—probably a good idea, or whatever, and anyway it’s not like—I haven’t been avoiding it, or _not_ talking about it, like on purpose, it just… hadn’t really occurred to me as a thing to do, which—” He sighed, setting his fork down and resting his forehead on his hands. “I mean that’s kind of what it’s like. I don’t know what to do, but not like I can’t decide, more like—like I’ve forgotten what the options are, for being a human being. Or something.” He lifted his head, darting a brief glance at Julia’s concerned face before looking down at his bowl. “Fogg said, he thought maybe there were things that—that I lost, back there, and they have to, to grow back, or—I think he meant it metaphorically, although who ever really fucking knows with this shit.”

“Does that feel true?” Julia asked. “Like does that feel like what’s happening?”

The question surprised him. He hadn’t considered it and took a moment to do so now. “I—guess so? I—coming here was a good idea, I think.” He looked at her long enough to catch her half-smile. “When I was at Brakebills it was almost like—Han Solo in the carbonite, like—just frozen in time, and—everything—it wasn’t terrible, exactly, but just kind of, I don’t know, uncanny or something. Like a—well like a ghost, I guess. Just this thing acting out the motions. Here it’s a little more—organic almost, like—” He huffed a startled laugh. “Honestly here it kind of feels a lot like being… super fucking depressed.”

“Have you considered…” she started, trailing off. Quentin looked up at her, the familiar thoughtful cast to her eyes. “I mean, what if you _are_ super fucking depressed? What you’ve been through would fuck with anyone’s head.”

“You seem to be doing okay,” he said, “and the past couple years haven’t exactly been a walk in the fucking park for you, either.”

Julia rolled her eyes. “Yeah, okay, I don’t really feel like running through the greatest hits of all the _truly excellent_ choices I’ve made since our first Brakebills interview, but I _invite_ you to consider them on your own time. And you didn’t see me when you weren’t here.” She worried at her lip. “Is it really that crazy a possibility?”

Quentin sighed. “I guess not, but if that’s the case, like, then what? They don’t exactly have a box on the intake form for ‘I died trying to stop an evil god-creature that had taken over my friend’s body and my friends brought me back to life.’ And I’m pretty sure they record that on the clipboard as ‘delusions.’”

“Magicians do a lot of things,” Julia said, “there has to be one in the city who’s a shrink with a very specialized clientele.”

“Yeah, and you think they accept payment in free hugs? Because I don’t exactly have insurance or an income right now.”

“I could help with—”

“Jules, I’m not gonna—”

“Okay.” Julia held her palms up. “Message received. Not pushing.” She stood up and retrieved a container of blackberries from the fridge. “So what else would you do when it got like this?”

“Mostly read Fillory, which—” He tried for a smile he hoped was more wry than bitter. “The magic’s kind of gone there. So to speak.”

Julia held out the blackberries to him and he took one with a murmured thanks. “But why Fillory? It’s an escape, I get that. But Narnia’s an escape. Pern’s an escape. Middle freaking Earth is an escape. What made Fillory the one that always stood out?”

“God, I feel like that used to be so clear to me, but…” He ate a second blackberry, a third, puzzling over the way he could identify that they were good but could not enjoy them. “It felt like coming home. That’s the way I always described it.” The answer he’d given therapists, Alice, internet acquaintances he’d found himself messaging with at three in the morning after finding each other on the Fillory subreddit. “Like reading it helped me remember who I was, enough to try actually being him again. I guess because it was the first one I really fell in love with, it was like it connected me back to the person I used to be, before—” He gestured loosely at his temple to indicate the faultiness of his wiring.

“Hmmm.” Julia looked thoughtful, but she didn’t say anything more on the topic. After a moment Quentin rose to put his leftovers in a tupperware for the fridge.

*

In the hospital the first time his father had brought him Fillory, the whole set, held out in uncertain hands with the sad hopeful smile one gave to the very young or dying. _Thought you might be bored in here, so... These are your favorites, right?_ A stupid question—Quentin had by that point been unable to shut up about Fillory for several years, had requested at every birthday a new edition or annotated version or associated biography—which stung not because it revealed any indifference of his father's but because it demonstrated how alien Quentin must seem to the man standing at the doorway of his hospital room like he feared contamination in some direction. Several years later the cheerful M.S.W. available through the university's free counseling program would point out with a gleam of triumph in her eye that when he spoke about his first hospitalization he only ever talked about how terrible it felt to see his father in that setting and not about the fact that his mother had come once on the evening of his admittance and never again; he would thank her for her insight and then begin avoiding her calls attempting to schedule another session. Objectively he could see that it was his mother's actions which constituted in fact quite a significant failure of parenting, but it remained his father's face which stung to remember: the fear Quentin had awakened and would never, it would turn out, be able fully to ease. The fear and how gently his father had approached him, his father who loved him but was not a gentle man, like his son had become something breakable or perhaps already broken, another shattered ashtray waiting to leave shards like guilt embedded beneath the skin.

*

“Quentin. Quentin?”

Even through closed eyes he could tell the light through the curtains was dim and he pondered briefly whether he could smell smoke or hear any other indications of emergency that might explain what Julia was doing at his bedside at some hour of the morning minimally three ahead of the time at which he had been waking up. Finding no such indication to justify the urgency of her tone, he rolled over onto his other side and squeezed his eyes against the glow.

“I know you want to sleep the day away, but I have bad news for you. I am bringing the tough love and it is pants-o-clock, my friend.”

“But why,” he managed to mumble into pillow.

“Because—” and he heard here a rustling— “I got my ass out of the apartment stupid early to get these fuckers fresh, and you are _not_ letting them get cold on us.”

Quentin turned his head toward her and opened an experimental eye. “Are those bagels?”

Julia grinned. “You bet. But you know how I am about crumbs in the sheets, so: make yourself decent and get yourself out there.”

She gave him a playful shove to the shoulder and he held his hands up in surrender. “Okay, okay. Pants it is.”

In the kitchen Julia had set the table: orange juice in a glass carafe and matching blue mugs into which she was pouring coffee from the pot, with a sugar bowl and a little steel creamer containing, Quentin knew without needing to ask, half-and-half, the only dairy product Julia considered an acceptable addition to drip coffee, and on their plates the bagels, arranged so that suddenly he remembered—

“Our bagel order,” he said. “Sesame with lox spread for me, raisin with cream cheese for you—”

“And when they’re ready, we swap halves,” Julia finished, sitting down. Their routine for years, anytime they found themselves together on a weekend morning, uninterrupted even by the arrival of James, who had been charmed by their unspoken synchronicity and content to order something with eggs and meat on plain for himself.

He joined her. “I’d forgotten—how could I forget about this? God, how long has it been since we—”

“Too long,” she said, and bit into her first half; through a mouth full of food she added, “Way too long.”

Quentin began to eat and it wasn’t that the bagel tasted better than anything he had eaten lately, but it tasted like—a Saturday in the spring between a week in which he had turned everything in on time and a week in which no major deadlines loomed, and they were sitting in Julia’s room laughing because the previous night they’d gone to a student-written play because a friend of hers had done the light design and when they got there it was this stupidly pretentious thing about, like, _Oppenheimer_ and _The Bomb_ and _Man Versus Nature_ , and halfway through the first act while two of the actors engaged in some incomprehensible modern dance involving for some reason a bathtub and several umbrellas made of old newspapers Quentin had snuck a look at Julia, horrified at the possibility that she might be enjoying this, and she had caught him looking and raised her eyebrows in the universal gesture for _wow okay then_ , and he had leaned over and whispered _you’d think Oppenheimer would know nuclear fallout will totally clog your drain_ , which was not even a particularly funny thing to say but it made Julia snort, which made him laugh, which made him try very hard not to laugh or at least not to make any noise as his shoulders shook mirthfully, which made Julia laugh, which set him off again, until they had to leave at the act break because they were giggling too hard to say silent and finally collapsed howling in the theater lobby with a glee that carried into the next morning, walking back to campus bagels in hand doing impressions of the lead actor’s self-serious squinting and the stiltedly symbolic dialogue, and everything had seemed very far away except what was in the room: his friend and the warm pleasure of being a little mean together where nobody could see, and the laughter they traded back and forth like children with a ball.

“Yeah,” he said, and then, grabbing the spark: “Do you remember junior year, when Richie did the lighting for that play—”

“ _Oh_ god,” Julia said, setting down her juice and placing her fist over her heart. “ _I am become_ ,” she intoned as she had for weeks afterward in the warbling tones of the first-year playing Oppenheimer’s pregnant wife, “ _life, the mother of worlds!_ ”

“And _hwat_ ,” Quentin said, using the accent someone had apparently thought connoted dignity and a particular era but which sounded like nothing so much as a middling Shakespearean actor from Alabama having a stroke, “shall the _new century_ _call_ these children of mine!”

“ _Robert!_ ” Julia cried, already barely able to keep a straight face. “Oh, _Robert!_ This man of mine, _fertile of genius_ , but _barren of sight!_ ”

“The future _waits_ ,” Quentin declaimed, punctuating his words with a fist on the table, “for _no one_ , and _time itself—_ ”

And here as tradition dictated they shouted together at the top of their lungs: “ _RUNS ALWAYS AHEAD!_ ”

Julia dissolved into peals of laughter, and Quentin—Quentin was smiling, he realized. Like he’d never forgotten how. “This was a good idea,” he said, taking another bite.

Julia smiled back at him. “Well, eat up. We have more where that came from. It’s a very busy day.”

“So you have like a whole plan,” he said.

“Quentin, please,” she said, leaning forward. “Do I ever _not_ have a plan?”

They walked along the park all the way to Columbus Circle, weaving through joggers and families with strollers and the occasional pair not unlike themselves. The canopy overhanging the stone border had turned a vivid ochre shot through with the last traces of summer’s green and the air was brisk in a way that reminded Quentin of the promise of a new semester, with fresh school supplies lined up awaiting his use. Julia bought a bag of roasted nuts from a street vendor and Quentin helped her pick at them. They spoke little and Quentin began to feel self-conscious about the extent to which his life lacked any of the minor new developments or current interests that would have formed the basis of much of their conversation on a day like this. But when he tried to apologize Julia squeezed his hand and shook her head.

“You can apologize tomorrow, okay?” she said. “But I’m calling a moratorium on that whole thing. In the meantime I promise, I am doing exactly what I want with exactly who I want to be doing it with.”

“Okay,” said Quentin, not exactly appeased but trying to follow her lead. “Where are we going, anyway?”

Julia cocked an eyebrow at him. “Do you trust me?”

“Is that an Aladdin reference?”

She laughed. “Only if you want it to be.”

“Well, in that case.” And he answered, high-pitched and cartoonish, feeling another smile tugging at the corners of his mouth: “Ye-es…”

Their secret destination turned out to be the Strand, to which Quentin had not been in years but which filled him with a wave of nostalgic recognition so strong it felt almost physical as soon as its familiar red awning rose into view. Julia looked at him, expectant and a little smug, and he could think of nothing to say so even though it seemed stupid to hug her for bringing him to a bookstore he hugged her anyway.

They poked through the dollar carts outside looking for hidden gems of absurdity to read out loud to each other: self-published thrillers, astrologically informed sex guides from the ’70s, exploitative detective novels with covers as lurid as their erotic scenes. Once inside Quentin wandered the shelves, feeling like a traveler returning to a half-forgotten home.

“I literally can’t remember,” he marveled, “the last time I read a book for fun.”

Julia picked a collection of short stories off the shelf and flipped through it. “Honestly? Me neither.”

“If you had told me in high school,” Quentin said, “that that would one day be my life, I honestly think that would have freaked me out—I mean, less than the dying thing. But more than the magic thing.”

“Yeah,” Julia said. “But that’s because a part of you always thought magic might be real.”

“But _all_ of me knew that I liked freaking _books_ , I mean…” He ran his fingers over the spines in front of them, appreciating their textures and colors, the comforting promise of their printed titles. “Like even before—you know, before I came back, and before the monster, and the castle—I think it must have been sometime before Brakebills. Like actual literal years ago.” He picked up a volume of Frost with an appealingly used cover, a book he had owned once and let slip away with most of his collection when he had entered the world of magic. The typeset pages under his hands felt like the door to a room he had seen in a dream.

He left the bookstore with the Frost, and a Le Guin he’d never read, a novel by a Brazilian writer his favorite professor had done her master’s thesis on, and _Moby Dick_ , another old favorite he had once considered insignificantly important to keep, and a promise from Julia that some day in the far distant future when he had secured for himself remunerative employment she would allow him to pay her back for this, at least. He felt a little electrified to even speak of such a future, which while still distant seemed palpably more imaginable than it had this morning, and as they wended their way through the Village he felt less like Julia was leading him around and more like he was walking with a friend.

They made their way to a coffee shop where they could share a table by the window and the barista drew elegant leaves in the foam of their drinks. “You know there’s like a latte-art spell craze on magician Twitter?” Julia said.

“There’s magician Twitter?” Quentin said.

“There’s everything Twitter. Under digital wards, obviously. Anyway so there’s this whole niche community of hobbyist spellcrafters. I saw someone post a spell that’ll make your foam show that like, really old film clip of the horse running?”

“Really?” He took a sip, considering. “That’s actually pretty cool.” He thought that Alice would like it, then set the thought aside in the guilty place he stored all his thoughts about Alice.

Julia was watching him. “Have you done magic, since?”

Quentin shook his head. “At first I didn’t know if I still could. But now I—I know it’s there. I can feel it in me, I just… haven’t wanted to.” The question of magic, like the question of Alice, was caught in a dark thicket it made him wary to approach. He was grateful when Julia didn’t press the question.

Instead she said, “Why are magicians so all or nothing? I mean, even just me—magic has been my everything, and it’s been nothing to me, and it’s saved me and totally fucked up my life, and I know we all just kind of accept that that’s what it’s like, but, you know, maybe we should spend more time with those magicians who become, like, accountants or whatever. I’m starting to feel like they’re the ones who have it figured out.”

“You think I should become an accountant?”

Julia rolled her eyes, not unkindly. “Q. Please. I’m not your mom, okay? Passive-aggressive suggestions are not my style. If I thought you should become an accountant, you know that I would fucking say so.”

He bowed his head at her, appreciative. “Fair enough.”

“I’m just saying, I don’t want to act like our situations are the same, but I’m also trying to remember who I was before, because I was so convinced I had to throw that person out to become what I wanted, and that just doesn’t feel true anymore. Especially since,” and she smiled at him here, a little playful, “she couldn’t have been _all_ bad, if she got you on her side.”

Quentin let himself enjoy how easy it was to smile back at her. “Yeah, she was pretty terrific.”

Julia had made reservations at—it took him a moment to place it—the Italian restaurant at which their families had celebrated the week they got into Columbia, a night when Julia’s mother went the whole evening without a single snide comment and Quentin’s parents made it through with their cordial pleasantness intact, and they talked about what they were going to major in and what clubs they might join, and his life felt open and familiar at once. Over dinner they didn’t talk about magic; they talked about old memories and inside jokes, bad movies and riders with poor subway etiquette, whether Quentin needed a haircut and the tutoring gigs Julia had been picking up from her friend whose schedule was full (“You’re a magician,” Quentin said, “and you’re going over exponent rules?” “I’m a Columbia grad,” she said, “and their parents are paying me two hundred bucks an hour to do it.”). He felt like himself; he felt like Julia’s best friend. At one point he heard himself laughing, and realized it wasn’t even the first time that night.

Back in the apartment Julia sent him to shower and change into sweats while she arranged the final portion of the evening. Under the water he paused and remembered what Fogg had said, and thought that he could feel it: little tendrils of selfhood, buds of memory and inclination, reaching up out of somewhere dark and cold, coaxed by Julia’s watchful hand. For the first time since returning he felt like he might be a person with a future, even a future as small as a morning in which he could wake up and know the day was his.

Julia had set up a pair of pale milky drinks he could identify only when he joined her on the couch and saw that the television was displaying the DVD menu for _The Big Lebowski._ He took a sip. “God, these are vile.”

“I know,” Julia said. “But rules are rules.” She held up her glass and they clinked a soft toast.

Sometime after they had shrieked _Nobody fucks with the Jesus!_ and downed their glasses Quentin felt himself overcome with gratitude so potent it was almost like sorrow. His throat tightened. “Jules, I don’t know how I’m ever going to begin to pay you back for this. And I don’t mean the money, or not just the money, I—”

“You don’t owe me anything,” she said, “and I’m not doing this to get something back someday. I just want to help, okay?”

“I just,” he said, and swallowed, trying to keep his voice steady, “I just don’t know how I can deserve you in my life, after—” After every mistake, every act of short-sighted selfishness, every crisis barely passed before opening into another—

Julia paused the movie. “It’s not about _deserving_ , Q,” she said. “You got me on your side, too. Way, way back. And all you ever had to do was be you. So if you really need to think about what you’re giving me, if that helps you right now, then you should know that you can just—just be. And that’s enough. Okay?” She nudged him with her shoulder. “ _Okay?_ ”

He was unconvinced but he nodded, blinking back tears. “Okay.”

“Good.” She smiled and turned back to the screen, pressing play. “Now, hush. I’m trying to watch the movie.” But she squeezed his hand, tight, and left hers warm on his after, until the credits rolled.

*

He had watched Julia for some time before they became friends. What struck him even then was her fearlessness, which manifested at that age largely as a thrilling indifference. When Ms. Murphy called on her she answered in a definitive tone and betrayed no worry if she was wrong; on the playground although she was often as alone as Quentin was, it seemed not to bother her if other people noticed. It was such a different mode of existence from what he understood as his own, the questioning half-whisper he could not alter or prevent when he spoke in class, the recess periods spent daydreaming while trying to will himself invisible. He watched her trying fruitlessly to learn the secret she carried so effortlessly of how simply to be herself. Years later he would reflect on how backwards it was that when she poked her head into his spot beneath the slide and said _Wanna play?_ his immediate response was a quiet panic; only much longer after that would he recognize that she had been lonely, too. But he stood up and joined her and by the end of the day she was promising to ask her mom for a playdate and he went home so dazed by his sudden turn of fortune that in the car his mother asked if he felt sick. Julia would go on to teach Quentin many things—how palm a card, how to learn Sindarin, how to play Go and draw a fancy S—but this was her first lesson to him: how not to be alone.

*

His head. His head was pounding and the light behind his eyelids felt like an intruder using a battering ram to enter a bird’s nest. His head was pounding and his stomach was roiling like that party freshman year, this girl Sheila from the bio class he was taking for a core credit, pretty enough and nice enough and willing enough to chatter pleasantly over sea urchin dissections, and that could have been enough for him to like her if he had not been so convinced in those days with a myopic despair that he would never in his life like anyone the way he liked Julia, but college was about fresh starts so when she invited him to the party she and her suitemates were throwing he agreed and thought that although it seemed unlikely anything would happen a normal person would go into the evening holding out the hope, only the concept made him so nervous he spent the hour before getting drunk in his room alone and only realized exactly how drunk he had gotten when he nearly gagged on a sip of beer a few songs after he’d arrived, at which point flashes of conversations he’d been having in which he babbled inanely about Star Trek and a long uninteresting anecdote about backpack-shopping with his mother came blaring back into his brain, and the embarrassment had barely had time to set in before he had had to run into their bathroom and spend an hour puking his guts out into the toilet of someone he was stuck being lab partners with for another seven weeks, all because he was too much of a fucking freakshow to just go to a party and get a normal level of drunk, too much of a coward to even contemplate having a regular conversation with a nice pretty girl who might let him take her top off, too hung up on the best friend who would never in a million years see him as anything other than a goofy kid brother to not see her image laced with undeserved bitterness somewhere in the back of his mind each time he even thought about doing anything in that realm of experience, stupid fucking kid whose entire life would in some way be a repetition of exactly this, choosing over and over the least acceptable way to be for some idiotic reason felt in the moment like gospel in his stupid fucking—

—his head was pounding and his stomach was roiling and his whole body felt trapped under something leaden and cold but he needed to—

He made it to the bathroom in time; Julia found him with his cheek pressed against the toilet lid, trying to steady his breath. “I fucked up.”

Julia laughed a little, sounding hoarse. “Yeah, that was my bad. White Russians should _not_ be consumed by anyone over the age of twenty-two.”

Quentin shut his eyes. “No, I—” The sourceless klaxon blaring _you fucked up you fucked up you fucked up_ was starting, so familiar it felt perversely like a homecoming, because this, _this, god, Quentin, you idiot_ , this was in fact what it meant for him to return to the land of the living, not books and coffeeshops (distractions and ineffective ones) but the constant bone-deep understanding which was both secret and impossible to hide that somewhere in the recent past there had been a right choice and he had failed to take it. “I shouldn’t have come here, I shouldn’t be—making you take care of me, I need to get my shit together and—” Stand on his own two feet, for once, for _once_ , he needed to just be a goddamn adult like every other goddamn adult who had somehow cracked the secret of basic functioning which eluded him no matter how many times he convinced himself he’d learned it—his stomach heaved and he lifted the lid to dry heave into the bowl.

“Hey, Q.” Julia’s voice now was soft and concerned and he hated it, hated the gentleness with which she placed her hand on his back and that she was seeing him puking his guts out like some idiot eighteen-year-old during orientation, hated that he hadn’t been able to shut himself up because he was a machine for turning other people’s care into pain. “I think this is the hangover talking.”

“It’s not, it’s me, I’m—”

“It is,” she insisted, rubbing his back like she might with a sick child and he hated himself for how soothing he found it, “you’re going to get some sleep and some water and some advil and feel better, okay?”

“I’m—” He stopped himself, sick of his own selfishness in subjecting her to his miserable inner monologue, _no one wants to hear that shit, Quentin, unless they’re getting paid,_ and he had forced her to put up with so much of it already, when she had her own shit to deal with and her own life to live, which was an actual life unlike his attempts to pantomime whatever it was that real people did—he gagged again, bile burning the back of his throat.

He didn’t know how much longer he knelt there hunched over, coughing up acid as his guts spasmed while Julia, saintly, pressed her warm palm softly up and down his spine and he wanted to shrink away from her touch in the shame of knowing just how long he had carried the grotesque and barely concealed hope that one day she might touch him with a new intention. It felt like a long time. The specter of himself after beginning at Brakebills haunted his vision when he shut his eyes, the dark secret thrill he’d derived from power-tripping over the one person who had only ever shown him kindness out of vengeance for crimes that were his own imagining, and all the while she’d been—and then she’d—his chest shuddered and he realized he had started to cry.

“It’s okay, Q,” Julia was saying, over and over, “it’s gonna be okay,” and wasn’t it supposed to be some kind of basic tenet of human existence that it felt good to be loved? If this couldn’t penetrate the miasma of guilt—if his failures overpowered even Julia, her unfailing care—if he couldn’t even receive love how could he ever hope meaningfully to give it and thereby be worthy in any infinitesimal measure of the graces he had spent his whole life so jealously craving—“I’m gonna get you some water. Just wait here, okay?”

“Okay,” he managed. While she was gone he wiped his mouth with toilet paper, too dizzy still to stand, and gave a final flush. Then he leaned against the bathtub, head tilted toward the ceiling, eyes closed, trying to steady his breath. It really was astonishing how many mornings he had spent like this given how few of the previous evenings had in any way risen to the sort of occasion that merited a day spent sleeping it off: no epic nights out to trade stories of with someone else who remembered them in pieces, just too many hours spent relearning the lesson that once he had outdrunk his own awkwardness he had gone too far. All those times he had told himself he would drink just until his anxiety eased and understood too late that his anxiety was such that the level of ease other people achieved at tipsy came to him only at world-spinningly drunk, all those mornings recalling that his self-consciousness had the valuable effect of preventing him from spewing shit no one needed or wanted to hear about at stupidly great length and volume, god, he could never just _be normal_ , could never…

Julia reappeared with a pair of pills and a glass of water he quickly realized she had charmed to stay full as long as he needed it. “Thank you,” he said as he accepted them, trying to muster up authentic gratitude under how badly he hated to make her see him like this. “I’m sorry.”

She shook her head. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”

“For—you’re taking care of me, giving me a place to live, and I’m just—throwing up in your bathroom, you saved my life and I can’t even—I can’t do anything—” The words were spilling out of him even as he knew how pathetic they sounded, _as if she needs you to enumerate every reason you’re a waste of time_ — “I can’t do anything for you, and you—after all the shit I pulled when I got into Brakebills—”

“Quentin—” Julia sounded incredulous now. “What the hell, that was _years_ ago. A rough patch in the history of our _entire lives_ , during which I almost killed you—”

“Only because I—”

“Stop. Just—we both fucked up, and it was forever ago, and I’m not going to relitigate shit we moved past or fight with you while you’re like this. Drink more water.”

He forced down a few more sips. He couldn’t look at her knowing she must be thinking of another time in another bathroom with his same stupid fucking melodrama, barreling into the men’s room on his floor because of an ambiguously despondent email and finding him sick on the pills he had meant, really, just to knock him out for the night. _Couldn’t even manage that right, terrified her for no reason, all you do to people, some sick part of you likes the attention, how much longer do you think they’re going to put up with_ — “I think I need to go back to bed.”

“I think that’s a really good idea.” Julia stood in a single movement which in his state struck Quentin as nearly miraculous in its gracefulness and held out her hand. “Come on.”

He let her pull him to his feet even as it seemed a final proof of the completeness of his incapacity, his body jerking upward like a poorly designed marionette. When he got to the bed he collapsed into it and shut his eyes against the day, against time and light and the long history of his inadequacy.

*

After in his dorm room when she had said _What the fuck was I supposed to think?_ he had sat on the thin twin mattress with his legs pulled up and buried his head behind his knees. _Sleep forever is a, it’s an idiom, I thought_ — _I mean I didn’t think, I’m sorry, I was just_ — _drunk and exhausted and_ — _I’ve just been having trouble sleeping, is all._ He looked up; she was shaking her head. _You can’t not think like that. Not with me. Not about this_. Her face—her eyes were red and her cheeks streaked with tears and her brows knit with something between fury and grief and her mouth still quivering—her face looked— _I know. I know. I’m sorry_. Sorry to make her look at him like—as though he were—he didn’t ever want her to look that way. _And not sleeping, Q, isn’t that what you said was happening last time? Look, you missed Bower’s class last week, and you bailed on us on Friday_ — _maybe you should_ — There were so many ways to finish that sentence that he could not stand to think of her uttering, like he was something fragile she needed to safeguard. _I’m fine, Jules. Really. It’s not like that, okay? Just_ — _busy, and stressed with application stuff, but_ — _it’s fine._ He smiled at her, trying to sound convincing; she bit her lip. _You’d tell me if it wasn’t, right? So we could_ — Smiling broader now, his voice stronger: _Of course. I promise_. But he didn’t tell her then or anytime in the next six weeks as the situation grew increasingly difficult to deny until at last in a statement of resignation he silently took himself to the hospital. The following week he started at Brakebills and if in the long terrible months of their feud he ever thought about all the things he had never told her and now believed he never would, he was quick to hide them in a drink or an assignment or some other piece of his life which could quickly be sloughed off.

*

The hangover lasted through sundown, although he felt shaky and drained into the night. At Julia’s encouragement he managed to eat and keep down half a sleeve of Saltines and some lukewarm water. In the morning his body had settled but his brain was still spinning through highlights of his idiocy, the lifelong accumulation of proof of his own fault in his inevitable isolation, and he could not make himself get out of bed or stop the echo in his mind reminding him again and again how pathetic he was for being unable to make himself get out of bed. When Julia checked in on him he blamed his head and his stomach and kept his eyes closed so he wouldn’t have to see her face brimming with what he knew would be a mix of skepticism and concern.

In his dreams he was standing on the banks of a river. The sky was dark and it was raining; the outlines of the landscape, flat and empty in every direction, should not have been visible but he could make out their crevices dimly through the particular sight of dreams. His legs were splattered with mud; his hair clung wetly to his face as the rain dropped cold onto his skin. The river pushed wildly through its bed, its edges seeming to rise every moment. He could not remember why he had come to this place but felt certain he had been here before and thought that perhaps there had been something important he had left behind, although how he would find it in the dark he could not imagine.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter gets a warning for suicidal ideation.

On the third day he woke up and he felt—better. His head felt empty, but in a clean sort of way; while it took concerted effort to sit up, stand, and pull on a T-shirt and some jeans, he was able to achieve this and when he stood for a moment to survey his own steadiness he discovered merely a small desire to fall back under the covers. Brushing his teeth in the bathroom, he felt haunted by the site of his recent breakdown, but only to a degree that made him flinch inwardly. Beneath his sluggishness he felt even a certain lift as he considered the day ahead, the same nascent optimism he had gone to bed flush with two nights before which no longer presented itself as a cause for self-recrimination: he wanted to see Julia, to sit at the breakfast table with her if not precisely to eat, perhaps even to read. It had been so long since he could remember wanting anything that this modest array felt significant.

Julia was sitting at the table, looking at her phone. As Quentin walked into the kitchen, she looked up at him, smiling. “Hey, sunshine. Feeling better?”

“Yeah,” he said, then, as though confirming it to himself: “I am feeling better.” He poured himself some coffee and joined her. “I, uh. Probably shouldn’t drink for a while, I guess. Alcohol being a depressant, chemically, and all.”

Julia bit her lip. “I’m sorry about that.”

He waved her apology off. “No, it’s—I mean I’ve had hangovers before, but that was pretty… unprecedented.”

“Are you sure that’s all it was?” Julia asked. “We still don’t know what could be going on with you, as like a side effect of bringing you back.”

Quentin considered the second day, incapacitated only by the unease of his mind, and the river, with its bulging flow. He pushed those thoughts aside. “I’m not _sure_ , but I don’t have any better ideas, and I do—I do feel better, in a sense that’s… still pretty bad, but better than I have since coming back, and honestly probably longer than that.” The months leading up to his death were greyed out in his memory like a story that had happened to someone else, like his brain had recorded the events but Quentin himself had not been there to experience them. When he considered their contents it seemed perhaps a small mercy that he could not access what it had been to live so long under the monster’s whims. “So I kind of just want to focus on that.”

“Makes sense,” Julia said.

He drummed his fingers. “So do you have any like, errands I can run, or…? I don’t really remember how people fill up their days.”

Julia grinned. “Yeah, I can work with that.” She reached across the table and squeezed his hand and he smiled back at her, grateful.

It was difficult, to rise at a consistent hour and accompany Julia to the grocery store and face 3 p.m. feeling exhausted by the energy every small thing had required of him and overwhelmed by how much of the day still remained. It was difficult but it got easier, to shower every day and read Frost before bed and run out to buy a bulb to replace the one in the Tiffany lamp that had blown out. Not less effortful, precisely; it took much inner coaxing still to propel his body forward. But as he did these things it became easier to trust that he would do them, or to imagine himself as a person who did them, and might do other things in the future. Sometimes he didn’t make it; often by evening his stamina had worn down and he would wile hours away on the couch ruminating aimlessly on his mistakes. But other days he washed the dishes while Julia dried them after dinner. He told himself he would read a chapter of _Moby Dick_ while she was out with a client and he did. He even managed to eat a little more, still lacking an appetite but no longer always feeling like he was forcing food into his body like a sullen child eating greens at parental behest.

Also Josh dropped off a pan of exceptionally potent weed brownies with Julia as a kind of very on-brand convalescence gift. That helped. Julia came home to find him standing barefoot in the kitchen, wearing sweatpants and his old Columbia hoodie, shoving fistfuls of dry Honey Nut Cheerios into his mouth, and he thought to himself with an emotion that took a wrong turn on the way to rueful and wound up at amused that this was hardly the worst thing she had unexpectedly witnessed him doing. Her earrings dangled and jangled and caught the light with a mesmerizing golden sheen.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she said, smirking a little, “I’m thrilled to see you up and about after dark. But, um. You know we have bowls, right?”

The light on her earrings was brighter than anything else in the room or perhaps New York City or perhaps all of creation, something like noonlight on waves except it also stood out like neon, but not like neon now with all those shitty LED screens light-polluting the darkness, neon like in those old photos of shop signs and marquees, like amber preserving the memory of light, only it didn’t look like amber, it looked like gold…. Belatedly he parsed her question but could only manage to respond through a mouthful of cereal, “You’re not my mom.”

“True!” Julia agreed. “It was just a suggestion.” She knit her eyebrows at him. “Do I have something on my face?”

“Your earrings,” Quentin said, “are like…” He sighed. “Distracting.” He ate some more Cheerios. “You know these are like actually really good?”

Julia laughed. “Yeah, they’re alright.”

The next day as they were eating lunch she said, “Can I throw out a crazy idea?”

“Given what passes for our normal, I’m a little scared to hear what qualifies as crazy,” Quentin said. “But yeah, go ahead.”

Julia stirred her pasta around, like she was gathering up her words. “I was just thinking—and to be clear, I am _not_ judging you—but… _have_ you considered… that if you’re going to be taking some kind of psychotropic agent every day—which, again, not judging—but have you considered that maybe it could be one that you get from a doctor?”

Quentin didn’t respond immediately and after a beat of silence she said, “Just an idea. I mean because what if Josh is busy, or something? Or there’s like a parasitic fungus in the royal Fillorian weed garden? I’m just thinking through the contingencies, here.”

“I might still want to finish at Brakebills,” Quentin said. “I mean I haven’t really—I don’t have a plan, yet, but.”

“Okay,” Julia said slowly. “And?”

“I—at my Brakebills interview,” he said, playing with a loose thread on his shirt, “Fogg gave me this whole spiel about, you know, out in the world, everyone medicates, but in there, once you know who you are, you—they hope you won’t need to.”

Julia snorted. It was an unattractive noise that filled Quentin with a rush of affection. “Right, okay. Is that why half of all magicians we’ve met have some kind of major substance abuse problem?”

“Funny.”

“It’s not a joke,” she said. “This was coming from Fogg? Whiskey in his coffee Fogg?”

Quentin shrugged. “Magic comes from pain,” he said because he could not bring himself to say the real issue, which was that the fact that Brakebills had not cured him as Fogg had seemed so confident on that day it could weighed on him as a particularly humiliating failure.

“Everyone has pain,” Julia said. “And everyone finds a way to deal with it. It’s not a crime to look for an option that doesn’t involve constantly setting fire to your own life.” She shook her head. “Sorry. I’m not really talking about you anymore.”

“It’s fine,” Quentin said. He found himself thinking suddenly of Emily, how she had blamed her wine-soaked evenings on the drudgery of office life a few hours before curling up against him as he wore the face of a man who had never once cared about her. He wanted to change the subject. “It was nice of Josh to make those, though.”

“It was,” Julia agreed, accepting his shift. “You know, everyone’s really…”

She trailed off like she couldn’t decide how to finish the sentence and he supplied, “Worried?”

“Well, yeah,” she said, smiling a little. “But not just that. I don’t know, I’m trying to come up with a way to say they’d love to see you that doesn’t put any pressure on you. I guess I just wanted to remind you they care about you.”

Quentin did not know how to fully process that information, which felt somehow like both a gift and a rebuke. His internal architecture for receiving and giving care felt damaged, the importance of his friends not forgotten but peculiarly abstracted, not unlike the disjointed distancing of emotions while stoned. “I should probably make plans to see them soon. I mean, right? Show them I’m not, like, borderline catatonic anymore.”

Julia considered him. “If you feel ready. But you don’t have to. If it doesn’t feel right.”

“I don’t—” He ran a hand through his hair, briefly covered his face, gathering his thoughts. “It’s like, there’s the part where you just can’t get out of bed, right? If this is—if my brain is doing what it does sometimes. There’s the part where you just can’t get out of bed, and then after that there’s the part where getting out of bed _sucks_ , and it’s _hard_ , but you _can_ do it. And—and you have to get out of bed when that’s happening, or at least try, you know, most days, because one day maybe it’s not gonna suck to get out of bed, but you won’t get there without going through the shitty part first. If you just—wait for it to feel okay, then you’ll just never get out of bed again. You know?”

“Not really,” Julia said. “You’ve never talked about it.”

“Okay, well—” He huffed out a breath. “That’s—that’s what it’s like. Or, part of, I mean, the silver lining of it being a, a chronic condition is that you, you figure some things out over time. And one of them is that there’s not like a tesseract that takes you from can’t get out of bed to basically okay. You’re the ant crawling on the string, the whole time. And that’s—it’s not just getting out of bed, it’s everything. It feels awful, but you keep doing it, and then one day it feels… less awful. So… so I think maybe I do have to.” He took a sip of coffee and noticed his hand was trembling lightly. “Not because I want to right now, but because I—I want to be a person that wants that. I mean like who I was before, like—that is who I am, somewhere underneath… whatever. Right?” He could not resist adding this last or taking comfort in the immediate sad surprise in Julia’s eyes.

“Of course,” Julia said. “Of course you are. Okay. if you’re sure.”

“I’m—” He laughed a little. “As sure as I could be about anything right now. Which is, you know. Not. But it’s something, which is more than nothing, and most things are nothing, so. So yeah. I guess I’m sure.” He felt the stirrings of a strange and slightly anesthetized energy which could have been excitement or could have been anxiety or could have been too much caffeine.

“In that case,” said Julia, smiling a little, “should I throw a dinner party? Make a pot roast? Send a group text to meet us some night at The Dead Poet?” Quentin must have visibly flinched because she laughed and said, “Or we could start slow.”

“Slow is good,” he agreed. When he thought about trying to manage the wave of obligations that would swim into being seeing all of them at once he felt a miserable impulse to return to being less himself.

“Who do you want to start with?”

“Well, let’s see.” He tried for what he hoped was a wry smile and began counting them on his fingers. “There’s my ex three times over; the friend I awkwardly came on to and then basically ghosted after he spent months in like, mind prison; his best friend; and either the alternate universe version or the one true love of the dead roommate who hated me. Or Josh.” He looked at the fingers he was holding up. “Hm, wonder why this feels weird.”

He was half expecting Julia to remind him again that he had the option to wait, and thinking that maybe this time he would take it for a little while longer. Instead she said, “Penny didn’t hate you.”

Quentin raised an eyebrow. “Not that I doubt your powers of insight, but you didn’t exactly know him very well. Although—” He hesitated. “Are you and Twenty-Three, like…”

Julia rolled her eyes. “No. We are extremely not like. We—whatever. That’s a story for another time. But,” and her expression softened, “I would say I know him well enough to say that… any version of Penny is someone with a lot of baggage. And, yeah, he—the one I know—had more of an incentive to deal with it when it came to you, because he was in love with his Quentin’s best friend. God, that’s such a mindfuck to say. But there was a lot standing between him and whoever wound up in his life. I mean, look at what he did, right? Signing that contract… that’s not someone does when they’ve really figured out life on Earth.”

Quentin wondered if he had seen Penny in his time in the Underworld, and how long he’d stayed there before passing beyond. The phrase that echoed like an image from a dream: _You didn’t want to leave all this, did you_? He tried to think of what Penny had been leaving and was startled when he could not think of one thing with certainty beyond Kady. He wondered where the line was between someone who wanted little and someone who struggled to hold on.

“I guess I should start with Alice,” he said. “I kind of feel like I owe it to her. And I know you’re going to say I don’t owe anyone anything, and maybe that’s—true, or healthier, or whatever, but—it’s more than nothing, so. That’s… it’s fine for now.”

Julia looked at him for a long moment, thoughtful. Quentin tried to imagine talking to Alice: her lips pursed in concern, their history hanging thickly between them, his body tense with the uncertainty of how he was now allowed to move around her. “Okay,” Julia said. “Do you want me to ask her when she’s free?”

“That’d be amazing, actually,” he said. “And, Jules—if you ever want to tell that story, about you and Penny… I want to hear it.”

“Yeah,” she said. “One of these days.”

*

Alice: her worried expression, her hair splayed and shining on a pillowcase, the flat blade of her voice when someone was incorrect, the way her hands moved when she was casting, like she had been practicing the motions her whole life. When he had loved her it had been the most consuming emotion he had ever experienced that was not despair. Sometimes he would wake up before her and watch her sleep (the uncharacteristic peace of her face at rest, the private view of her eyes without her glasses, the smooth curves of skin he could not stop thinking about touching), always wondering the same inarticulable question: _how?_ And pulsing inevitably beneath it like a heart defect: _how much longer?_ Not long before he blew it all up they had stayed up late one night trading stories of familial dysfunction and at one point she had said, _I feel like at some point my body just went into fight-or-flight and never came back. And a part of me knows that if you expect everything to be a fight that’s what it’s going to be, but I don’t know how to stop._ He had felt overwhelmed by a tenderness he did not know he could possess, arms around her bare back while she pressed her cheek to his chest. In many bitter hours of regret later on he would think about this, how the reasons they had fumbled towards each other were refracted in the mechanism through which he had initiated their undoing. That they had both always been people who let go too easily of what they did not expect to be able to keep, which was everything.

*

Alice came on a Wednesday afternoon on which after much deliberation on Quentin’s part Julia had vacated the premises for privacy but promised to stay nearby, easily textable in case of critical levels of awkwardness. He opened the door and it was Alice: her hands curled tightly at her sides, her rounded shirt collar, her face caught between anxiety and a forced and uncharacteristic brightness.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hi,” she said. “It’s good to see you.”

“Yeah. You, too.” He nodded, trying to make himself believe it. “Come in.”

They sat on opposite ends of the imposing brown couch, clutching beverages in their laps (water for him; orange juice for her). Quentin wished desperately that he could drink without worrying about the risk of another incapacitating reaction. “So—” he tried, at the precise moment that she said, “I—”

In unison they said, “Sorry.” Alice smiled a little.

“You first,” Quentin said, out of some combination of the desire to be gracious and the desire to buy time.

“I just—it really is good to see you,” she said. “You seem—even the last time I saw you it was like you weren’t really you in there, like you weren’t all the way inside your body, and I got—I was so worried we’d fucked something up, on the way back, but… now, you’re…”

“Showered?” he offered. Alice huffed a small laugh and then bit her lip like she wasn’t sure she was supposed to. “I’m feeling… better. Or, more myself, which, you know, isn’t always great, but. The change of scenery has been good, I think.”

“Good,” she said, nodding fervently.

“What about,” he said, “I mean what have you been up to, since…?”

“Oh, um.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Mostly trying to—lay low, and really—do some thinking about what I want to do next. There’s a lot going on, in the magical world, and for once none of it really involves me and I’m trying to keep it that way until… until I can really feel like I’m choosing something because I think it’s right, and not because I’m just— _reacting_ to something else that happened.”

“That sounds good,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said.

A long silence followed in which the stilted echoes of their conversation rang like the buzz of fluorescent lights. Quentin wondered: how long it would be like this, whether in fact it would ever be any other way, whether it would be like this with everyone. Was this who he was now, among the people he had called friends, a stiff and dull acquaintance. He wondered too if perhaps apart from his own forgotten capacities this was on some level how it always would have wound up with Alice, with whom even when things had been good they had never been easy, long before their history had taken on its peculiar bent shape. As certain as he was beneath the haze of what he actually felt that he wanted whatever life he was trying to remember how to live to include Alice, he could not summon any trace of whatever spark had led him to rekindle their lost romance.

“I’m pretty out of touch with—whatever’s going on out there,” he said, to say something. “I haven’t even done magic, since—you know.”

“Oh,” Alice said, her tone neutral but her expression unmistakably sad. “Why not?—Sorry, that’s really personal.”

“It’s okay,” Quentin said, surprised to feel that in fact it was. The fraughtness of magic was not precisely neutral territory for them, but it was common ground. “I mean, I don’t have some kind of like, big philosophical stance against it, or anything. But when I think about magic, I just feel like—it just feels like it’s pointless, and it hurts at least as much as it ever helps, and, and it’s not safe, so—why bother.”

Alice bit her lip. “I get that,” she said. “Of course I get that. I’d be a pretty big hypocrite if I didn’t. What you’re saying is true. But, Quentin—magic is other things, too. And you really loved it, once.”

“I know that’s true,” he said, “but… there’s a lot of me that feels like—I came back without it. And I don’t know—” He hesitated; he had not said this even to Julia. “I don’t know how much of it I’m going to get back. Maybe magic, and—loving it, or whatever, is just—not for me anymore. I mean the last time I used it, apparently, it ended about as badly as it could.”

“Apparently?” Alice said, her watchful face tilting slightly.

Quentin swallowed. He had not meant to tell her and had wondered more than once whether it was right to be honest or kinder to omit the truth. “I don’t exactly—remember dying. Or—what led up to it. The last couple days, actually.”

He could see Alice nodding, putting together the pieces. “Oh.”

“Julia kind of filled me in,” he said, “about a week after I came back.”

“What did she tell you?” Alice said.

Quentin shrugged, looking into his glass. “That there was—a plan, and I—insisted we go in as a team, because we’d… gotten back together, and you and Penny came out, and you told her that Everett had shown up, and I’d… made the sacrifice play, I guess.” The story sounded strange in his mouth, like he was telling some summer camp lore about a distant friend of a friend of a friend. “But I don’t remember any of that. Not the, the Seam, and not going in, and not—you and me.”

“I see,” Alice said. He could not identify the emotion of her tone so he made himself look at her face, but he couldn’t read her expression, either. She was biting her lip hard like there was something she wanted to keep from falling out of her mouth. “So you don’t remember—it was kind of your idea, and you don’t remember… why, or…?”

He shook his head. “I’m really sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s not your fault.” She blinked a few times in rapid succession but when she spoke her voice was even. “Look, if you want me to go—you don’t owe me anything, just because—”

“What—no, I don’t—so I don’t remember all that stuff, but I do—” He breathed in deeply. “When I started being able to, to piece the world back together, I—I knew that you were someone I—trusted, and cared about. Even when the rest of my memories had just started coming back—I was really kind of a blank those first couple days—but when you would come by, I could, I could feel that connection. And that’s still there, and I still—want that.” He thought for a moment about how little he had to offer her. “If _you_ don’t want to be here, I get it, and you don’t owe me anything either, ever really but especially after, god, bringing me back from the fucking dead—”

“I want to be here,” Alice said. “And I’m not—this is weird, and awkward, because we’re weird and awkward, but I haven’t been _pining_ over you.” She winced. “That came out worse than I meant it.”

“No, I don’t—I don’t want you pining,” Quentin said. He could feel a small smile coming on. “Over anyone, but especially me.”

“I just—I don’t have a lot of people that matter to me in my life,” Alice said. “I’m not good at that. And you do matter. And I want that. I want to be—your friend.”

“Even if I don’t exactly remember how to do that?” he said.

“You will,” she said, with a familiar firmness.

“I want to believe that,” he said, “but what makes you so sure?”

At that she rolled her eyes, not unkindly. “Come on, Q. You’re not the only one here who’s had to—remember how to be human.”

He couldn’t argue with that, which on reflection was why he had told her in the first place. “Thank you,” he said.

“Thank me by getting better,” she said, and he appreciated that after everything she thought enough of him to be a little demanding still. “Can I ask—what do you remember? If you don’t mind telling me.”

“No, it’s fine.” He cast his memory back, with some reluctance, into the period before. “I—honestly most of the last few months before everything went down are kind of—gray, or—it’s like remembering a dream, or something from when you were a kid that you’re not sure really happened—like I remember what happened, but it’s like someone else was living it. So—the monster, and all that weird shit with the identity spell, that stuff is loud and fucking clear, and I kinda wish it weren’t, but—there’s some point a little while after he shows up, and we’re all ourselves again, I can remember the motions but it doesn’t feel real. And that’s how it us up to you and me heading down to Brakebills South. That’s where things sort of start to dissolve, or whatever. I remember going there, and I remember leaving knowing that we’d gotten what we came for, but the actual time there is pretty much a blur. And then it goes blank.”

Alice was watching him. Again he was struck by that unusual expression of hers, looking at him like there was something she wanted to be said but could not name it herself. “Do you remember learning your discipline?”

“What?” Quentin said, surprised. “No. Did—did Mayakovsky tell me?”

“Yeah,” Alice said. “Do you—do you want to know it?”

“Sure,” he said. He was not sure he would ever do magic again but it seemed unwise to turn down an offer of information about the mystery of himself.

She smiled a little. “Repair of small objects.”

“Really?” He frowned. “I always thought it’d be something cooler.”

Alice laughed. “Yeah. You said that down there, too.”

“Well,” he said, “thanks. I guess it’s good to know. I kind of assumed it would feel more different than it does.”

“It’s like reading a spell versus doing a spell,” Alice said. “Magic isn’t theoretical. You don’t get to know it by just—thinking about it.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe one day I’ll—see what it really means.”

Alice studied him for a long moment, mouth pursed, seeming to consider something; then without preamble she took off her glasses, snapped off the legs, threw them to the floor, and crushed them several times under her heel.

“Alice what the fuck,” he said.

She arched her brows insouciantly. “Oops.”

“Okay,” he said. “I see what you’re doing.”

“I wasn’t aiming for subtlety.”

“You’re more than capable of fixing this yourself.”

“Sure,” she said agreeably, “but I’m not gonna.” She looked expectantly at the mess on the floor, then back at him.

“I—” He sighed, knowing that between the two of them she was by far the more stubborn. “Fine.” He set his glass on the coaster on the coffee table and readied his hands: palms up, fingers flat, thumbs tucked, then left cupped above, and—

—it was like he hardly needed to cast. Like the broken parts had been waiting for him and appreciated being welcomed back into what they were meant to be. He had thought he would need to direct them back into position but all he had to do was want them to be whole.

And as the pieces wended their graceful way into the places they belonged, he could feel something inside of him shifting too, some new growth unfurling or winter ice cracking to let water flow, some emptiness receding to make room for a delicate beauty—he was doing magic, he _was_ magic, how could he have forgotten about this—

He held the glasses in his hand, marveling. Alice was smiling at him. Instead of handing the glasses back to her he lifted them back onto her face using a quick levitation spell, just for fun, just because he could.

“Alice,” he said, and broke off laughing. Because suddenly he felt that he could see her for the first time since his return. Suddenly she was Alice: her brilliance, her stubbornness, her absurd sweet tooth, the way she shrieked with laughter when she thought something was really funny. His friend Alice. “Oh my god, Alice,” he repeated, smiling hugely, and leaned over to give her a tight hug. He had spent months wondering what new deficiency had spawned within him that he could not miss her and now it was like he was feeling all those months of her absence at once. And not just her but everyone—he desperately wanted to see his friends, Eliot and Margo and Kady and Josh and even Penny, the people who had outsmarted death itself for him and made him laugh and taught him how to mix a proper drink. He wanted to thank them and see their faces and hear everything he had missed about their lives and do something pointless for no reason except to do it together.

“So,” Alice said, looking pleased with herself. “Was it worth it?”

“Yeah,” he said, amazed. “It was.”

*

His first year at Brakebills, a party at the Physical Kids’ Cottage like any other party at the Physical Kids’ Cottage, some night early on before the catastrophes had begun to pile up on themselves like snow: lights strung up in the trees out back which pulsed in time with whatever song was playing, two second-years reminiscing boisterously by the staircase, a table bearing chips and salsa Margo and Eliot had found a way to charm into arranging themselves into the perfect proportions upon dipping. He and Alice had not yet fallen into each other, but she was the right combination of buzzed and used to him to be almost agreeable; Eliot called him over at one point to meet a handful of recent alums who had dropped by. Margo instructed him to make her a drink and deemed his effort passable. Outside Penny was so busy enjoying watching Kady demolish all contenders in a friendly Push tournament that he forgot to drop an insult when Quentin and Alice passed by as they walked around to get some air. There was nothing special about the evening which Eliot and Margo in their morning-after postmortem would deem a solid B+ effort but Quentin briefly had to lock himself in the bathroom because he was overwhelmed with the novelty of how right it felt to have a place he could say he belonged, where he felt awkward and uncertain and as terrified as usual, and somehow simultaneously like he was coming home. When he returned to the party Alice called his name like she had been waiting for him, and for a moment he had dared to hope that perhaps this was finally the first piece of what he had been longing for his whole life.

*

Quentin had woken up on so many mornings to the thought _I want to die_ that its presence alone did not strike him as immediate cause for alarm. Those well-adjusted enough that they could not fathom thinking it assumed that the thought itself indicated some definite and conscious desire but Quentin, who had lived for years with its various shadings and degrees of saturation, understood it like an unwelcome guest with whom he could nevertheless live for months at a time in relative peace. It echoed in his head like an irritating tune, without cause, not a whisper but hardly a scream.

His head, though. His head felt like it was splitting apart or perhaps being gored open, right above his eyes.

 _I want to die_ said his brain a little more insistently as he nudged further into consciousness and “ _Fuck_ ” he said out loud as he opened his eyes and the pain intensified and somewhere beneath his guts began to creep the inarguable sense that whatever the world beyond this space held for him it was something he could not bear and which he did not have the strength or intelligence or skills or fundamental human capacity to handle.

 _You’re being crazy_ he told himself and _I want to die_ said his brain and he had dreamed, he remembered, of the river—

 _Get up_ , he told himself, _just get up, get up and talk to Julia, have some coffee, just get up, you can worry about what next after you just get up, get up, get up_ , but his body would not move as though a critical nerve fiber that connected intention to action had been biologically severed, and he knew he was being crazy but he could swear that gravity had become stronger or that perhaps some invisible succubus was stretching its form suffocatingly upon him.

In the dream he had been at the river and the rain had been cold on his face and hands and he had come to the river or been summoned to the river or appeared by magic at the river’s edge to look for something, something important, but around him had been only dirt and mud and dark and as the panic had begun to bubble up that there was no finding the thing he had lost he had become aware through the second sight of dreams of a presence on the other side, some malevolent stalking thing that filled him with dread—

 _It was just a dream, it was just a dream, you’re being crazy, I want to die_. He shut his eyes and tried to redirect his thoughts ( _I want to die_ , louder and louder, tangling now occasionally with _you should be dead_ like a morbid fugue) to reality: yesterday, laughing and trading small spells back and forth, Alice had stayed for dinner and afterwards the three of them had lain on the floor with the lights off constructing for themselves a private miniature fireworks show, and he had felt—it had been—Alice—

_Alice who you destroyed and used and pushed away and discarded, wasting her time on you out of pity, come on, idiot, you don’t think she’s actually your friend after all that, none of them are, they’re just waiting for you to figure it out so they don’t have to feel guilty about clueing you in._

“No,” Quentin said to the ceiling as though by speaking it out loud he could drown out the noise in his head. “No, they—they risked everything to save me, you don’t pull that shit for someone you don’t care about—”

But it was impossible to conjure up an image of himself in anyone’s company in a meaningful way. All his memories of them carried the same gloss of humiliation as a dream in which he had suddenly realized he was naked, the sense that this whole time he had been unwittingly revealing his own idiocy while everyone around him was too polite to point it out. He could feel the bottom of his thin faith giving way to the abyss always waiting no matter what anyone did or said to remind him that he was and always would be alone. He saw himself in his mind’s eye, alone at a party or alone with someone he had been stupid enough to call a friend who would never bother to think of him outside his presence, alone on a bed having accepted finally the reality of all his so-called relationships, reaching for a bottle of pills…

He had never quite been able to explain this, so that even his therapists never seemed to understand. People thought that when a depressed person thought of suicide it was with a feeling of relief or else some dark yearning, but although there had been times when he had truly wanted to die equally often the idea presented itself almost like a movie he could not shut off or look away from and which came to seem more inevitable as it wore a groove behind his eyes. As a teenager in the last days before someone would give him a name to and protocol for what he was he would lie awake at night trembling with fear because although he did not want to die he was more convinced by the day that there was no other outcome that made any kind of sense. There were only so many times he could watch himself make the irreversible choice before it began to erode all other possibilities he could imagine, leaving only itself.

The pain in his head was unspeakable and inside it was himself reaching for a bottle of pills and in the dream the thing on the other side of the river had been he was sure watching him and inside his head where no one would mourn him he was reaching for a bottle of pills—

He wanted to call out for Julia but felt too stupid to say the word. Instead he fired off a quick text, nondescript, _hey come in here if you’re up?_ , and a minute later she was at his door.

“Hey, what’s up?” she said.

“I, um—” And he had had something like a plan but horribly as soon as he heard the kindness in her voice he started to cry.

“Q,” she said, and crossed to sit on the edge of the bed. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s just—I don’t—uh—” Quentin was trying to make himself say _nothing_ but his brain was too crowded with the river and the pills and Alice who he had destroyed and who would come to despise him as they all would because he was a thing built to be despised... “Could you, could you just, sorry, do you know Morgan’s Shadow?”

Julia blinked. “The sleeping spell?”

“Yeah, I—I have this killer migraine, and—”

“It’s unpredictable,” she said, “and I’ve never cast it before, you could be out for anywhere from two hours to two days.”

“That’s—” _amazing, just to sleep and never wake up, return to the darkness which is the only thing which will not reject you justifiably for being what you are_ “—fine, I—it’s fine.”

“Do you want to try some Excedrin first?” she said. “Or, I could look up healing spells, or try to brew something?”

“Just—Julia, please,” he said, voice cracking, and he knew, he knew, he knew how pathetic he sounded, and he could see in her face _the twisting of revulsion, she could see through him to what he craved_ this was not about a migraine, but he couldn’t stop _nothing keeps you here except your own stubborn delusion, careless and uncared for, useless fucking piece of shit, the bottle of pills_ himself from begging.

“If you’re sure,” she said finally.

 _It doesn’t matter because you don’t matter and you have never mattered, the thing that other people have that lets them linger in memory is something you were never good enough to learn, worthless fuck-up wasting everyone’s time_ — “I’m sure.”

Julia bit her lip, but she raised her right hand, fingers together, thumb tracing an arc across the palm, left hand to his eyes, and it took two breaths, just, one to feel the heaviness settle onto him, and one to fall blessedly asleep.

*

He was at the river and it was cold. The rain slapped the water sounding like distant gunfire. He had left something important here and he needed to get it back; he could not leave if he did not find it. Or he could leave but he would need to return. Or he could leave but he would be lost forever. He knelt in the mud, squelching miserably as his knees sank into it, trying to see in the darkness. The land spread out without end in all directions, a flat and featureless expanse of rough wet dirt. The clouds obscured the stars and moon and it occurred to him that he could die here looking for what he had left.

On the opposite bank, across the rising water, something dark paced back and forth. Quentin could not see it but knew its shape like the place of his own body. When he looked in its direction he felt sick with fear. The dark thing was more powerful than he, kneeling in mud empty-handed, and it was angry and malformed and wished to cause him harm. They had met before and Quentin thought that it had injured him but he did not remember how. He could not shake the sense that it was something that should not have come into being and in letting their paths cross he had spelled his own doom.

*

Julia was at his bedside when he came to, watchful. It was dark outside the windows.

“How long was I out?” he asked, voice cracked from sleep.

“Just about thirty-six hours,” she said. “How’s your head?”

“Better,” he said. “Still hurts, but—better.” The pain had subsided to a steady throb, still strong enough that it made movement seem impossible but an improvement over the piercing agony from before. The images, he noted with relief, were gone too, although the self-loathing so thick it made his every limb seem heavier remained.

“Q,” Julia began, and he hated being responsible for the careful concern in her voice, hated it, hated him, “the way you were acting—what you looked like, and what you asked for… was that really just about a headache?”

For a long time he did not answer and lay looking at the ceiling in the dimness that passed for dark in Manhattan. He did not want to confess or worry her but the trouble was that he was no better at lying than he was at anything else. “I mean, it was a pretty bad headache. But…” He swallowed. “No.”

She waited for him to continue and in the silence he forced himself to sit up because lying down was making him feel stupid, like a sick child. He brought his knees to his chest and leaned his forehead against them, somehow exhausted despite the day and a half of sleep. “I… don’t really know where to start. Uh, I guess you could call it a relapse? A setback? Or just me being an idiot.”

“Pretty sure it’s not that one,” Julia said.

“I feel like… things were on this kind of upward trajectory, I mean a slow one but, I was feeling, you know, not the worst, and I was doing things, small things, but things that weren’t just lying in bed all day, and I, I did magic for the first time and it felt amazing, it felt—” He shut his eyes, throat tightening, unable to continue with the memory of the sweet hopeful buzz that had swirled in him all evening and which lingered now only to drive home his foolishness in believing it. It had felt so real and now seemed like such bullshit. “And now it’s all just—gone, worse than if it had never happened, because I can, I can _feel_ all these things I thought I had and I feel so fucking stupid for—” He couldn’t finish.

“You’re not stupid,” Julia said. She hesitated before continuing. “The last time—when you had that killer hangover—was that—did it feel like this?”

His face burned with the humiliation of having been caught. “Yeah,” he managed. “Not—it felt different, and this was—this is—worse, but… yeah.”

The confession hung in the air between them. Quentin wondered what Julia was thinking and if any part of her regretted having invested so much time trying to help someone who always cycled inevitably back into this pitiful uselessness.

“It feels kinda like,” he said to break the silence, “the universe is, like, punishing me for feeling okay.” He was not sure the universe was wrong to do so.

Julia didn’t respond for a moment. “You’ve told me you don’t really remember what it was like, before. But it was not a good fucking time. We were all really just trying to make it to the next day. The rest of us, though, as fucked up as it was, we’ve had time to at least start kind of processing it. Maybe as you’re starting to get back to yourself, that stuff is coming back too. Like it’s all—mixed together.”

“Yeah,” Quentin said, “maybe.” He rubbed the heels of his hands into his eyes.

“Last time it got bad, and then it got better again, right?” Julia said. “So why don’t you—why don’t you just rest, and we’ll see how you feel in a few days. And then we can think about whatever might be next.”

“That’s probably a good idea,” Quentin said, out of some combination of inertia and a wish to please. Although he had just woken up he could feel his eyelids growing heavy with sleep again already and as he lay back down he was hardly aware he was doing it. With his eyes closed in the dark he thought about Julia’s suggestion, which he could not argue with and which was more appealing and therefore less trustworthy than his own suspicion about what was unspooling within him: that in fact this was the true self to which he was returning, with all delays along the way only detours and denials.

*

It took longer this time: another four days in which he could not bring himself to do anything but sleep and hate himself for it, a week solid of dragging himself through basic motions like showering and mealtimes while feeling guilty for providing Julia with such a silent companion. He could see Julia’s growing worry and wished he could do something to allay her fears. On the day he finally found in himself the readiness he had previously mustered to face at least their small joint existence he shaved and washed his hair and put on jeans and a clean shirt so that when she came home to find him reading—he had forgotten how long it was— _Moby Dick_ with his feet up, she would know to feel an instant relief.

“Hey, you,” she said, joining him on the sofa.

“Hi,” he said. He closed the book and sat up. “I’m feeling—pretty okay, today, relatively. Not like—” That handful of hours in which he had done magic with his friends privately thrilled with the novelty of how badly he wished everyone else were here still seemed like a mirage, but the depths which had followed were receding into memory too, like a nightmare which lingered only in its unease. He had never become accustomed to how alien the different versions of himself could seem when he left one for the other; it gave him the destabilizing sense of living in a body crowded with acquaintances he barely knew. “But I’m okay. Back on an upswing, I guess. And I was thinking—what Fogg said, about—needing to regrow things—I mean maybe there are just some, like, metaphysical growing pains happening. Or like, spiritual muscle soreness.” Quentin had no idea how likely this hypothesis was but he liked its metaphorical neatness and he hoped it would offer Julia the potential for some relief. “So I think if I just keep going, then it’ll be—you know.” He had meant to say _fine_ but at the last moment could not bring himself to use the word.

“Huh,” Julia said uncertainly. “I guess that makes as much sense as anything else.”

“You don’t seem convinced,” Quentin said, trying to keep his tone light.

She smiled at him. “I just worry. You know me.” She pulled her wallet out of her bag and slid a white card out of it. “I’m not going to pressure you, and I don’t want this to be a fight. But— _if_ you ever want it—I did do a little asking around.”

Quentin took the card. It was the business card of a psychiatrist with an office on West End, in the 80s. There was some kind of charge running through it and when he flicked it with his index finger a new line embossed itself in silver italics beneath her email address: _Sliding scale available for magicians_. “Oh.”

“Brakebills trained, doctorate at Hopkins,” Julia said. “Several widely cited articles in respected journals about the specific mental health needs of the magical community. Some pretty solid-looking testimonials on her site. I talked to someone who’d seen her after a really toxic relationship with a vampire, said she helped a lot.”

“Thank you,” Quentin said. He slid the card into his pocket, knowing both that he should call and that he wouldn’t. “When I first found out about all the magicians who go into just—regular jobs, with a magical twist, I thought it was nuts. I remember Margo saying something like, _there’s not enough noble quests to go around_ , and I thought, _well, then I gotta find them._ And I guess I did.”

Julia laughed. “Yeah, there’s not enough noble quests to go around because we’ve spent three years bogarting all the noble quests.”

He smiled a little at that. “Now if anything that kind of life sounds, like—way ambitious to even contemplate. Like I still—when I think about trying to have a future, I can’t even—can’t even picture it.”

“There’s no rush,” Julia said. “You’re allowed to take time to figure shit out.”

“I guess,” he allowed. “But the other thing is, if I say I don’t ever want to go on a noble quest again, which I fucking don’t, is that, like, good? Is that healthy, am I learning what life is really like? Or is it giving up, to just—turn my back on all of that.”

Julia shook her head. “Again with the all or nothing. Magicians, the ones who are most hardcore about it, we teach other to think like that, but there are so many ways to be that aren’t, like, impale yourself on every available sword or work a nine-to-five you hate counting the hours till retirement.”

“Isn’t that what magic kind of is, though?” Quentin said. “It makes these demands of you, and then you meet them or you don’t.”

“That’s what magic has been for _us_ , because we’ve had the shittiest luck imaginable,” she said. “And because, let’s face it, none of us were exactly wellness poster children even before everything started blowing up. But there’s more than one way to think about magic. As great as Brakebills is, and as much as my time with the hedges was seriously fucked up, I’m grateful that at least I learned that there.”

Quentin thought again, unexpectedly, of Emily, so certain of the immovability of her desire and her pain, so convinced a life with magic would only make it worse. He wondered how she was doing these days. “Do you think you’ll take Brakebills up on their official admissions offer?”

She shrugged. “Probably. I always did like school. And Fogg says the other thirty-nine times, I kicked ass there. I mean, I’m a nerd, Q—all the theory papers people complain about, that shit sounds like a dream to me. As long as I have some kind of life outside it, it seems like a decent place to go while I figure out what’s next.” She smiled at him. “But I’m not in a hurry. Right now my focus is helping you get to wherever you need to go.”

Quentin felt his throat tighten. He didn’t know that there was anywhere he was going, but he wanted there to be for Julia’s sake if not yet for his own. “Want help with dinner?” he managed.

“Sounds good,” she said. “I was thinking a stir-fry tonight.”

So Quentin chopped vegetables to her specifications and measured out spices and half-listened to the NPR podcast she put on and as she was cooking began to wash the dishes they had used. He ate almost an entire bowl and afterwards joined her on the couch to begin watching some absurd teen drama for which she had an affection she swore was not wholly ironic. He reminded himself that he had done this before, the last time quite recently in fact, and he knew how to grit his teeth and move forward: sleep at a decent time, up at a reasonable hour, carry out the schedule of ordinary human tasks, get dressed even if he wasn’t going anywhere, leave the apartment even when he had nothing to do.

He went to the Met, once with Julia and again by himself, examining the paintings he now knew to be done partially with magic, marveling most of all at the ones for which no such evidence had been found. In the Greco-Roman wing he studied the depictions of the gods, always mightier and more dignified than the gods he had known, feeling a slight pang at seeing a silhouette of Bacchus, whom he had not especially liked but who had not deserved to die as he did. There was a vase in a corner that showed Poseidon, Hercules, and Hermes fishing, and Quentin wondered if that had ever really happened, or if the artist had known how much closer he had come to capturing their world than his peers fixated on immortal glory. He wondered if the artist had met them, once.

He started taking long walks in the chill air through the park, wending his way through its curving paths, up and down its undulating hills, watching the joggers in their neon layers and the others like him alone among each other, sitting on a jutting outcrop of slanting gray schist or leaning against the railing at the reservoir. At first he thought he was using the time to think, but in fact it served mostly to clear his head, which was not unwelcome; the change of scene seemed to give him permission to stop thinking, which given the tenor of his thoughts was a relief, and he returned to the apartment feeling a new flurry of energy which could on the best days take him through a whole afternoon.

It didn’t help until it did. There were long stretches of gray he attempted to punctuate with actions and occasionally there were small rushes of coming back to himself which filled him with a thin tremulous hope. He had Julia show him how to pull up magic Twitter, and he chose as an unthreatening re-entry to magic a latte art spell which wrote in calligraphic letters the name of the intended recipient. Quentin surprised Julia with it by beating her to the kitchen one morning, and the delighted shine in her eyes which could have been for the spell or the coffee or the sight of him awake and grinning animated him for the rest of the day. He bought groceries and put on music and made spaghetti with pesto while Julia was out, and when she came home as he was spooning it into dishes he thought he could feel something slide into place at the notion of himself as a person who could make her smile like that twice in a day.

“I was thinking about what you were saying a while ago,” Quentin said over dinner, “and you were right.”

“Duh,” Julia said, and then: “What was I right about?”

Quentin smiled at her, taking a moment to savor how keenly he could feel his fondness. “About how we all act like there’s one way to look at magic. I mean, you get to Brakebills and the culture there really is that that’s _it_ , that’s what magic _is_. But then if you think about, like—we know collaborative magic is one of the most powerful ways to do magic there is, but it’s totally deemphasized in the curriculum there. It shows up in, like, exercises, or tests you have to pass, but the bulk of the time you’re really focused on what you can do as an individual magician, which is, like—”

“Not to sound like a college freshman who just took her first WGS class,” Julia said, “but it’s a very Western, historically very male view of magic, right?”

“Right,” Quentin said. “Which is not to deny the contributions of people outside that mold, even at Brakebills—”

“Of course not,” Julia said. “But it’s about the framework. The assumptions.”

Quentin nodded. “Yeah.” He was enjoying himself, he realized; it felt warmly familiar to be talking big ideas with Julia, like when they were in college or even before, staying up late at a sleepover arguing the ideological merits of letter grades after reading _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_.

“And if I go, or when I go,” Julia said, “I want to learn everything they have to teach me, but I also want to look for the stuff they’re _not_ going to teach me. Not just spells or potions, but whole approaches to magic, or perspectives on it. Because how can we be expected to figure out what magic is for us if we don’t see some of the options? Like what Kady is doing with the hedges, organizing, meeting, talking—there’s no grand plan right now, just all these people bringing their own experiences and points of view and knowledge together, so they can decide for themselves what they want magic to be. That’s at least as important as some conference about the latest developments in scrying methods.”

“Absolutely,” Quentin said. He knew nothing about this project but suddenly wanted to, and made a note to ask Kady about it the next time he saw her, and made a subsequent note of how naturally the assumption had presented itself that there would be a next time. It was coming back to him again, he recognized, the pieces of him that existed in connection to others—not quite close enough yet to touch but enough that he could tell it was near, like spring’s first hints of branching green.

“Speaking of going back to Brakebills,” Julia said, “I was thinking, too. About what you were saying, and where you are. Where we both are. I had drinks yesterday with some college friends, Richie and Ava and that crowd, and I went into it thinking, _god, what is it going to be like to hang out with these normal people, with their normal lives, who know what they’re doing_. And yeah, it was kind of awkward pretending I spent a couple years as a paralegal before deciding law wasn’t the field for me. But they’re also all confused, and messed up, and disappointed, and figuring shit out. Ava’s thinking about quitting grad school, Richie’s thinking about going to grad school, Nicole and Stephanie broke up because it turns out Stephanie was cheating on her for _years_ , Jordan hates his dream job, Sam actually _did_ spend a couple years as a paralegal and decide law school wasn’t it…. The mood was not, here we are now, confident about our life paths. It was very much, so what the fuck now? I found it kind of reassuring. Like maybe our lives are insane, but maybe we’re also just twenty-six.”

Quentin considered this. “So, what, you’re saying I might be a mess even if my life right now were grading midterm papers at Yale?”

“Is it that crazy?” Julia said. “Or that terrible?”

“Well, given my track record, it’s definitely not crazy.”

“You’re so hard on yourself,” Julia said. “I’m talking about me, too, Q. I mean, just to start with, I really thought I was gonna be with James for the rest of our lives. And even after it fell apart, I still thought, well, it’s just because of magic. If I hadn’t found that out about myself, we would have been fine. And James was great, and I loved him, but… if I’m being really honest, magic wasn’t the only part of myself I hid from him. I mean,” she went on with a smirk, “he had _no_ idea what a bitch I can be about Scrabble.”

Quentin grinned. “Kleenex _is_ a brand name.”

“Damn fucking straight it is.” She laughed. “Things like that, you know? Not any deep dark secrets, but—I was trying to be this person, this girlfriend, I thought I was supposed to be. I feel like that’s what everyone does at that age. And I know it wasn’t that long ago, but man, I’ve been working with this engineering major who needs help with his humanities requirements, and I look at him and think, this guy’s a _baby_. It’s crazy to me that I thought I knew anything about the world when I was his age.”

“Yeah,” Quentin said. “I feel that. Kinda thought I was the only one.”

Julia reached across the table to lay her hand on his. “That’s what I’m _saying_ , Q. You’re not the only one. We’re not the only ones. And your life at Yale would be easier, for sure—but it would have its fucked up parts, too. Plus, based on my experience with the engineering major, _way_ more comma splices and misplaced modifiers.”

“That’s true,” Quentin said. He tried to picture that alternate self, annotating Wittgenstein and marking up improperly formatted quotations, fretting over his dissertation, having some awkward hook-up with someone in his cohort and avoiding their eyes in the library. He had wanted it at the time but it struck him now that Julia was right that he had no reason to believe that life would have taught him to live it any better than this one had. In either case he was still left with the person he was at twenty-two, somehow simultaneously convinced he had solved the secret of life and terrified that he never would. Out loud he mused, “And it’s hard to imagine meeting someone like Eliot in the philosophy department.”

“No kidding,” Julia said. She squeezed his hand.

And there it was, lurching once more out of dormancy: the version of himself which existed not as an atomized entity drifting through space but as a thread woven tightly with the people he cared for. He felt his heart reaching forward to touch another and he wanted to see any of them but especially—his vests and his crown and how he grandly held court at a party long before he was a king—his style and his sweetness—the way he smirked and what an accomplishment it felt like to make him laugh— _Eliot_. Quentin was stunned by how huge the space in his heart was where his days without Eliot suddenly stung.

“Hey, what’s the Fillory situation right now,” he said, aware that he was talking a little too fast, “are we still using bunnies, or do we have a decent portal, or—”

“All of the above, depending on the day,” Julia said. “But if you’re thinking about talking to Eliot, I think he’s actually on Earth right now.”

“Oh,” he said. His heart was pounding and he didn’t know why. “Okay. So I would just—”

Julia stood up, waving him off. “You cooked, I’ll get the dishes. If you want to text him, text him.”

“I don’t know if I—” he began.

“I think,” she said, “based on what you’ve been saying, if that kind of thought occurs to you, if you just think of wanting something, these days, you should take it as a sign.”

Quentin was a little afraid that a text would open the door to expectations he might not be enough of a person yet to fulfill, but his fear was dwarfed by how badly he wanted to see him. Besides, Julia was as usual probably right. Before he could overthink himself out of it he shot off a text: _hey, heard you were around-ish. if you’re free sometime, it’d be great to catch up._

He stared at the screen after he sent it, rapidly sinking into self-consciousness about how banal it sounded after everything he and Eliot had ever been to each other, feeling the creeping edge of that fear that he would be too dull for Eliot’s taste now in this season of unforgetting. But it was less than a minute—the fastest he had ever known Eliot to respond to a text from anyone—before Eliot sent back: _for you, anytime. i can come to the city tomorrow?_

It should have calmed him, how willing Eliot was to display his own eagerness, Eliot who for most of their acquaintance would rather have died than reveal he genuinely wanted anything. It should have calmed him to know that in this case he had no need to worry about being the desperate one, but instead it made him—a flutter of something down his back— _that’d be great, actually_. Then, biting his lip: _feels like i should ask if you wanna meet at a bar, but i’m kind of not drinking right now. long story._ And just in case: _sorry_

This reply took longer, and Quentin didn’t know how to feel when it came: _rly never thought i’d be saying this, but kinda same._ It stirred something inarticulable in him, that having barely spoken for a year Eliot would still offer that up to him, knowing all that might be read into it. He worried about whether and how best to respond. But then Eliot sent, easy as anything: _so what have you been doing to fill up the time instead?_ And Quentin let out a long breath, relieved for the moment to be asked a question to which he had managed with slow and halting effort to start building an answer.


	3. Chapter 3

The strangest thing about Eliot was how easy he was. He could be demanding, flippant, sarcastic, irresponsible, condescending, and rude, yet none of it ever stuck to Quentin, who made a habit of holding on to the worst of things long past their expiration date. Those first few months hanging around Eliot and Margo he had often felt like a child, blustering and unsophisticated, but the sensation was tempered by the awareness that it never stung the way he assumed it ought to. He liked when Eliot sought him out for help, like he was useful; he liked it even better when Eliot waved him over for a drink or a bit of unimportant mischief. At a time when he had exiled the person who had anchored his life and was crashing alternately into and against an experience beginning to take the beautiful and terrifying shape of love, it provided no small amount of comfort to feel that there was miraculously someone who for no reason Quentin could discern was willing always to give him somewhere to be. Later, much later, when he had offered a new piece of himself and been turned down, he had sat for a day with the regret that he had tainted the one uncomplicated relationship of his life with his pathological awkwardness, an anxiety which had loosened the next time he saw Eliot (the light in his eyes, the tilt of his smile) and dissipated completely the next time Eliot pulled him close, which in some ways was what Eliot had been doing since Quentin stumbled up the path at Brakebills years ago: showing him how easy it could be, to let himself be drawn in.

*

They wound up arranging to meet at Central Park, by the entrance at 72nd. Eliot was late and in the minutes between their scheduled time and his arrival Quentin felt nerves rising like heat in his stomach. Despite the unseasonable warmth he stood with hands in pockets, rocking on his heels, trying to talk himself out of his worries: that Eliot’s life would have shifted so that it no longer contained a role that Quetntin could serve, that their time apart about which he felt an acute guilt would have reminded Eliot of all the reasons he didn’t need him, that in so long neglecting their friendship Quentin had broken it for good.

Then he heard a familiar “Q?” and turned to see him: walking up Central Park West on those long legs, no longer using a cane, hair shorter than it had been and a little longer than it used to be, wearing a brown knit cardigan and somewhat incongruous dark jeans. His eyes looked a touch uncertain and deeply glad; a soft smile was curling the edge of his lips.

“El,” Quentin called, matching the smile with his own. Before he knew what he was doing he was running over to erase the distance between them, his body moving before his brain could tangle itself into doubts. For a second as they reached each other his thoughts caught up enough to slow him with an unarticulated question, but Eliot answered it, pulling him close, and then Quentin could notice only how right it felt to wrap himself tight around Eliot with Eliot’s arms solid against his back, leaning his face against Eliot’s chest, grateful for the warmth and smell of him and his open embrace and how easily they fit together no matter how they changed.

 _Eliot_.

“I’m sorry,” Quentin said as they pulled apart, overcome suddenly with regret, “I’m so sorry—”

“What on earth for?” Eliot said, his hands lingering on Quentin’s arms.

“—for disappearing on you, and—I mean I know I was dead—”

“Uh,” said Eliot, “ _yeah_.”

“—but after, Jesus, you guys brought me back and I’ve just been so—weird and avoidant and—you were fucking _possessed_ and I haven’t even been around to—” The guilt which had begun churning in his stomach was threatening to spill over through his chest; now that Eliot was here it seemed so inconceivable that Quentin had spent so many hours staring blankly at him while he offered light conversation.

“Q. Stop.” Eliot was smiling still but there was a rare seriousness in his eyes which combined with the weight of his hands on Quentin’s shoulders to break through. “I was there, okay? I know you were—not yourself. It’s fine—and I know you’re about to say it’s not fine, so you can close your mouth—” Quentin obeyed. “—because I—I thought I was never going to see you again.” Something painful crossed Eliot’s face like a passing cloud. “And that was before you died, so—as much as myopic narcissism has kind of been my brand, that’s the kind of shit that imparts some perspective whether you want it or not. So, right now, I am _really_ happy to see you, and—can we just focus on that?” He tucked a strand of hair behind Quentin’s ear, a gesture which felt so delicate that noticing it pushed everything else further away. “Assuming _you’re_ happy to see _me_.”

Quentin didn’t know how Eliot always did this, but he could feel already his inner storm receding, replaced by the soft hopeful lift Eliot brought out in him. “Actually,” he said, already starting to grin, “sorry, but it _is_ a banana in my pocket.”

“You’re the worst,” Eliot said, laughing, and gave Quentin a playful shove. They met eyes one more time, and this time at Eliot’s face full of mirth and affection Quentin knew at his core that what was between them had miraculously survived.

As they strolled into the park Eliot offered snippets illuminating his life in Fen’s High Court, which seemed mostly to consist of minor diplomatic embassies, errands among the lowland farms, and calls to give counsel about the decor for castle functions and local town halls in which Fillorians could air their grievances and concerns. “It’s weird,” Eliot said. “Fillory sucks so much, in so many ways, but I woke up and I was free and you were gone, and everyone kept telling me, _it’s okay, take some time, you don’t have to do anything_ , but—I guess I’ve developed just enough self-awareness to know that that much unstructured time was going to lead me down a road I did not particularly wish to travel yet again. Plus, Margo—Margo would have stayed wherever I wanted her to, if it came to that, but I knew that’s where she wanted to be.”

“That makes sense,” Quentin said, thinking of how grateful he was to have Julia anchoring his days.

“So, dinners with the Lorian ambassador it is,” Eliot continued. “As a bonus, it turns out that it’s considered very improper Fillorian etiquette for the monarch to consort intimately with a non-royal but high-ranking member of their court, so that expedited a very overdue awkward conversation. I think Fen met someone the last time I was out collecting opinions on holiday observances in the markets, but she hasn’t told me yet.”

“Good for her?” Quentin ventured.

“I _hope_ so,” said Eliot. “I mean that’s part of why I want to know: so I can meet them and suss them out. Because, and it does strike me that this is possibly the strangest thing about my objectively strange life, after everything we’ve been through, Fen and I sort of _are_ family. I care about her. Kind of a lot, actually.”

“I think that’s nice,” Quentin said. It comforted him, to hear Eliot settling into his own generosity. He deserved to know and give so much love. “And it seems like things are—life is pretty solid for you, right now.”

“It’s honestly very boring,” Eliot said, “but of all the uncomfortable truths I have had to face about myself lately, the biggest one might be that I don’t actually hate boring. I might actually _be_ boring.”

Quentin smiled. “Eliot Waugh could never be boring. You could become an accountant, and you’d be the most interesting accountant in the world.”

“First of all, low bar,” Eliot said. “Second, we both know I could _not_ become an accountant, because I’m not that good at math.”

“Well,” Quentin said, “compared to my life yours seems like a nonstop thrillride. So, you know. Some things never change.” He offered a smile to clarify the spirit in which the phrase had been meant.

“What is your life these days?” Eliot said. “If you don’t mind. Julia’s been fairly reassuring but also vague. Something about ‘boundaries.’”

“Because we’re all so good at those,” Quentin said, although he appreciated the idea that she wanted to let him decide who got to hear his story. “I don’t mind. There’s just—not much to say. I—” He hesitated. When he thought too long about the shape of his present life it seemed humiliatingly small, and it was more embarrassing still to consider how fragile even the little he had reaccumulated of a self seemed some days. But it was _Eliot_ , who made hiding impossible and revelations come easy. “I mean it’s like you said: I got back, and I wasn’t myself, or not—not all of myself. Not much of it. And it’s been easier, since—Brakebills was, was complicated for me. Like, I loved it and I hated it—and Fillory was like, you know, that to the _nth_ degree, and it was just—it was too much to deal with, to feel anything up there, or over there. I think. Being somewhere else, somewhere—normal—I do feel more like myself. Which has its ups and downs, you know?”

“I do know,” Eliot said.

“So some days I feel pretty okay, and then some days I feel—like I used to feel a lot, before—you know. Just how I used to feel. And then sometimes even the good days are kind of stressful, because I can’t just sit around on this permanent vacation from real life forever. It’s like you said, I know I need something to do. But then some days I feel like can’t do anything, like I mean—really literally, in like a getting out of bed way, and even on the days I can I don’t even know what I want that thing to be, like I can’t even—imagine any kind of, of future. And I know,” he said, because he could see Eliot’s mouth pursing in a familiar concerned way, “I know I have time. Objectively. But it would be nice, to feel like I could—look forward.”

“I get that,” Eliot said. “You were going to go to grad school, right? Before Brakebills?”

“Yeah,” Quentin said. “I mean, I hadn’t gotten in yet anywhere. But that was the plan.”

“For what?”

Quentin drew it out to savor Eliot’s reaction: “Philosophy.”

Eliot made a face like someone had just suggested wearing brown shoes with black socks, then smoothed it over. “Sorry. Reflex.”

“No, I think that’s the correct response.”

“No offense,” Eliot said, “but like, why?”

“God, it feels like so fucking long ago.” Quentin tried to recall his collegiate self, twenty-two and desperate for anything that would make him feel less lost. “Honestly it’s pretty embarrassing.”

“Well,” Eliot said, “now you _have_ to tell me.”

“Okay,” Quentin said. “Well. I had majored in English, and that was—fun, and interesting, and I was good at it, but it felt like, it was ending and it hadn’t really led me anywhere. It hadn’t built up to anything, or answered any—big questions. And the inside of my head all the time was just, me tearing my hair out trying to find some kind of clinical, scientific reason it wasn’t totally pointless to be a person and stay alive, which, you know, I was—kind of a mess—but at the time I thought, like, _okay, well, literature didn’t have the answer, so what else can I try_? And I thought—if I spent five or six or seven years, just focusing on the people who had asked those big questions, and reading as much as I could of what they’d said, maybe—maybe by the end of it, I’d have an answer. Maybe I’d be able to finally solve it, for myself, at least.”

“Just so we’re clear, here,” Eliot said, “‘it’ in this context is… the meaning of life?”

Quentin rolled his eyes. “Like I said: embarrassing. Not to mention dumb, and kind of crazy, to think that I was going to—crack the purpose of existence, in my twenties.”

There was a pause in which Quentin assumed Eliot was refining his next quip. But instead he said, “I don’t think it’s embarrassing. I think it’s—sweet.”

Quentin raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Very generous.”

“Dumb, sure,” Eliot allowed, “but not any dumber than any other reason a twenty-two-year-old has ever had for doing literally anything. And yeah, it was a little crazy, but—I don’t think it’s embarrassing, to want something big and beautiful and important.”

“You don’t?” Quentin said, incredulous.

Eliot winced. “I don’t _anymore_.”

Quentin had wanted to argue, but something in Eliot’s voice hooked into his chest, the way he was displaying for Quentin to look at a small story of how he had changed, and he just said, “That’s a nice way to look at it.”

They stepped off the walkway to sit atop one of the big gray craigs jutting out of the earth, curved enough that once they had arranged themselves Quentin was looking slightly down at Eliot to his right. For a few moments he enjoyed the companionable silence between them, not needing to talk or look at each other, watching a steady trickle of black jackets walk on the leaf-strewn path beneath them and the distant motion of a children’s soccer game in a field beyond the skeletal trees. In the cool breeze and the sunlight the peace of the scene brought back a memory that made him smile.

“For my ninth birthday,” Quentin began, “my mom splurged and took me and Julia into the city to see _Cats_.”

“ _Cats_?” Eliot echoed delightedly.

“ _Cats_ ,” Quentin confirmed. “Which—I hadn’t asked to go see it or anything. Musical theater was like the only strand of nerdery I _wasn’t_ into as a kid.”

“Excuse you.”

“I think it was just—she was so excited that I had an actual friend, and she wanted to celebrate, and Broadway tickets for the big family-friendly hit was something she knew parents did. Our relationship is—not the best, but this was nice of her. Anyway. It was fine. I was nine. I thought it was cool when they came into the audience. A little confused about the plot.”

“That’s part of the essential _Cats_ experience,” Eliot said.

“But the part that really sticks in my head,” Quentin said, “of course, is afterwards—we got ice cream, and then we came to Central Park, and Julia and I ran around for _hours_ , pretending it was Fillory. When you’re a kid, you know, this place seems huge, and wild. Maybe not if you grew up somewhere with actual nature, but—it was summer, so everything was green, and the rocks felt like mountains—the Nameless Mountains, obviously. Man. I hadn’t thought about that in years.”

“That is almost grossly cute,” Eliot said. “And hey. At least fake Fillory didn’t turn out nearly as fucked up as real Fillory did.”

“They’re not as different as you’d think, though,” Quentin mused. “I mean, they’re both these places that present themselves like some untouched naturalistic paradise, but really they’re totally curated and cultured and planned by a bunch of powerful guys who cared more about their project than what it might cost. The whole Umber-Ember, order-chaos-balance thing, that was like the whole concept of Central Park, this idea of some place that was wild but not too wild, that would look quote-unquote natural but be in its own way perfectly manicured, plus it ties into that nineteenth-century post-industrialization dichotomy that shows up in all those cautionary novels about urban corruption, those anxieties about what it even means to live in a city and nature as this like balm or tool for moral instruction…” He recognized that he was thinking out loud on topics far from Eliot’s interests and cut himself off, a little embarrassed. “Sorry.”

Quentin waited for Eliot to say something wry if affectionate about the boundlessness of his capacity for geeking out. But Eliot just said, “How do you always know shit like that?”

“You know, I’m glad you asked me that,” Quentin said, feeling in the comfort of Eliot’s company emboldened and a little wicked, “because there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about. See, there’s this thing called _books_.”

“Ooh,” Eliot said, playing along, leaning forward with his chin resting on his knuckles. “Exotic. Tell me more.”

“So a book—it’s got all these pages, right?” Quentin went on, gesturing with his hand. “And the pages have words on them, and you read them, and you can find—all sorts of things, really. Not just information, other shit too. Stories and things.”

Eliot wrinkled his nose. “Sounds boring. Very uncool.”

“No no no, it’s—totally cool, very exciting,” Quentin said. “It’s like—like TV but for your brain.”

Eliot tilted his head. “But where are the pictures?”

“Well—some books do have pictures,” Quentin said encouragingly. He was aiming for deadpan, but a smile was escaping with the pleasure of Eliot’s commitment to the bit. “But what’s _really_ cool is, sometimes you get to make the pictures _yourself_. You just—you read the words and then you can decide what they look like. In your mind.”

“Hmmmm.” Eliot narrowed his eyes, pretending to consider. The corners of his mouth were tugging slowly upwards, too. “But does it slap? Does it bang? Does it _fuck_?”

“ _Moby Dick_ ,” Quentin said, leaning down to look Eliot in the eye, “ _totally_ fucks.”

Eliot smirked, eyes flashing. “Well with a name like _that_ , he’d better.”

And it was—Eliot making a juvenile dick joke like any of a hundred juvenile dick jokes Quentin had heard him make—Eliot close by and how luminous his eyes were with their long lashes near enough to see—how easily they had fallen after everything into who they were to each other and every small way Eliot had always shown him that he did not need Quentin to be anyone other than who he was—he could feel amidst the sun and the trees and the autumn air the spark of possibility, close enough to touch if he would only—their laughter and Eliot’s eyes and his dear mouth smiling fondly and a dark curl nestled against his forehead and beneath his collar buttoned at the base of his neck and Quentin wanted—oh, but he _wanted_ —fuck, _Eliot_ —

His body moved before his brain could talk him out of it and he kissed Eliot, too briefly for Eliot to respond but deliberately enough that there could be no mistaking his intent. Then Quentin sat back and marveled at how much he did not wish to take back what he had just done.

“Quentin,” Eliot said, his expression stunned and cautious and unreadable.

“Wait. Just—wait, okay?” Quentin ran a hand through his hair, energized like he hadn’t been in months, not since— “Because—I’m not drunk, or fucked up on magic or any other kind of substance, and—and we’re not marooned in time in the Fillorian backwoods, and I’m—well, okay, I am kind of emotionally compromised right now, but, like, El, I’m an emotionally compromised _person_ , so there’s no, no super stable version of me that we should wait for—and look, I get if that’s not something you want to deal with, _God_ knows I wouldn’t hold that against you, but just—you just have to know that this is me, okay? This is—all me, right here, right now, and that’s—it was me, doing that.” He was breathing hard. He felt—electric, radiant, in bloom—vibrant with something bright and clear inside him coming out of the dark—

“Are you done?” Eliot said uncertainly.

“Yes. No,” Quentin said, because he had wrested back a truth of himself and he needed to make sure Eliot saw it fully revealed. “It was never about—fifty years I barely even remember anymore, or—proof of concept, or—look, I know that our actual lives with all their insanity and motion and people and, and _everything_ , I know that’s not the same, as the two of us in a shack on another world. I always knew that. I said what I said because—that’s what I do, I argue and I talk around the important parts and I over-intellectualize every goddamn thing as like a coping mechanism for having way too many feelings, and I’d rather try to talk someone into something and fail than just—want something, I mean really _want_ it, and not—but I do. I wanted you then, and I think, I think before then, and I just didn’t know what I was looking at, until—and now. Now, I—I want you. And that’s me saying that, and me—wanting it.” It felt so right—in a moment Eliot would turn him down again and he would be embarrassed and who knew perhaps even heartbroken which struck him as a wonder even to contemplate but it would hurt, he knew, and he would not regret it because a piece of him lately dormant and never fully expressed had aligned itself in its rightful place. “And I know that I’m probably being really selfish right now, because you probably said what _you_ said just to let me down easy, and I’m making it super awkward by forcing you to do that again, but. I just needed to—say it. To make sure you knew, and for—for my own piece of mind, which, again, selfish, but—I said it. It’s said.” Quentin took stock of what he had communicated. “Okay. Now I’m done.” He looked at his hands in his lap and waited, face burning, for Eliot once again to close this door.

“Q,” Eliot said, soft, “look at me.”

Quentin felt that after his outburst it was the least he could do to obey and made himself meet Eliot’s eyes. God, he was so stupidly beautiful. How had Quentin forgotten?

“I—” Eliot started, then seemed to give up on words and kissed him.

He was so shocked that it took him a moment to respond, but after that moment— _oh_. Yes, this was what he wanted: the warmth of Eliot’s lips on his, opening slowly to each other with a purposefulness that sent shockwaves down his spine, Eliot’s big hand cradling the back of his neck somehow both strong and gentle, the shape of Eliot’s chest under his palm. They broke apart and once again it seemed that neither could keep himself from smiling.

“So hopefully that was clear,” Eliot said. “And if not, I’ll just say that—you can be as selfish with me as you want.”

“Well in that case,” Quentin said, and flush with the permission of it kissed him again. This time he moved to hoist himself into Eliot’s lap, so their bodies were pressed against each other, and Eliot could steady a hand at the small of his back, and Quentin could cup his face in his hands and begin to lean his hips against him, just a little, just as a statement of intent.

“I feel so dumb,” Eliot said, running his hands along Quentin’s waist, “you had this big speech, and I—I _had_ all these speeches planned—”

“You had speeches?” Quentin said, ducking down to nip at the space below his ear.

“I had a lot of time on my hands—trapped in a mind prison, haunted by regret, you know, you kind of have to make your own fun, and I—” Quentin had never seen Eliot look so open and his stomach jumped to know that it was all for him. “I rehearsed over and over what I was going to say, if I ever got the chance—and explain it so you’d really understand, and forgive me for fucking it up the first time, and—right now all I’ve got is, uh, I’m an idiot,” Eliot laughed, “just—just stupid as hell, so if your type is dumbass who can’t read—”

“My type is _you_ ,” Quentin said, and saying it felt like a spell, charged with the promise of what was to come and the thrill of knowing he had called it into being. Eliot’s eyes looked like they were between laughter and tears and he kissed Quentin’s neck and Quentin groaned, helpless against what it was to feel so _good_.

“Look,” Eliot said, “I know things have been weird for you, so if you want to take it slow—”

Quentin shook his head, grinning at how easy this felt. “Nope.”

“—I could be happy waiting for a long, long time—”

“No thank you.”

“—but if not—”

“Now I’m listening.”

“—then maybe we could go somewhere we could take our clothes off without getting arrested?” Eliot stroked his thumb briefly just inside the waistband of Quentin’s jeans and Quentin shivered.

“Yes,” he said, and again because he could: “Yes. Yes. Let’s go.”

Speeding down the slope of the stone, out of the park, uptown; kissing at a crosswalk while they waited for the light to change; across the street, hand in hand, Quentin needing to jog to keep up with Eliot’s absurdly long strides; up the steps to Julia’s building, Quentin fumbling for his keys while Eliot breathed distractingly against the back of his neck; into the elevator where Eliot kissed him so deeply he emerged onto the eighth floor feeling lightheaded; finally into the bedroom where his heart pounded as it set in that this was real. Eliot, tall and eager and lovely in his bedroom, looking at Quentin with an awe just starting to darken with lust—this was happening. It struck him with the same force of a miracle as the first time he had done magic.

“Holy shit,” he breathed, laying his hands lightly on Eliot’s broad shoulders, “we’re doing this.”

Eliot walked him forward until Quentin’s back was against the wall, and his voice was enticingly low when he said, “Yes, we fucking are.” And then they were.

Quentin had no real memories of this: a few blurred and miserable snapshots from this life, a set of impressionistic sensations from the life they’d never lived. Yet still it felt like coming home: the uneven rhythm of Eliot’s mouth hot against his, Eliot’s thigh pressed between his legs where already his arousal was pooling, the catch in Eliot’s breath when Quentin kissed with the gentlest graze of teeth the spot between his collarbone and his neck. Eliot kissed him deliberately and hungrily, like he wanted to leave Quentin no doubt that he was both cared for and desired, and it made his legs go weak. How had he forgotten _this_?—what it was to sink into a desire so complete it pushed every other thought away. He felt— _unbelievably_ fucking turned on, pushing up against Eliot to chase that delicious ache, turned on in a way that made him feel like suddenly he understood the phrase, because it was like a light had begun to flicker in every part of his body, a light or a fire, a consuming heat which grew with every rough sound he managed to elicit from Eliot and every new place Eliot’s hands found to touch. He tugged impatiently at Eliot’s cardigan and began pulling his shirt untucked even as Eliot laughing took the cardigan off, amazed at how much he was enjoying his own desperation.

When Eliot newly shirtless immediately moved to lift Quentin’s T-shirt up, he felt a passing jolt of self-consciousness about the body which he had always considered passable at best and which now still harbored an uncharacteristic boniness from his months of incomplete recuperation. But if Eliot was distracted by concern his face did not show it and the feeling was quickly replaced by a heady thrust of power at the way Eliot was looking at him, at the idea that Eliot, _Eliot_ , was looking at Quentin like he wanted to devour him. Eliot kissed into the top of his chest while his long fingers began to work at Quentin’s belt and Quentin wasn’t sure how much longer he was going to be able to stand.

“What do you want,” Eliot whispered, too urgent to sound in command, and was it really he who had unraveled Eliot of all people like this with so much of him still untouched, he, _Quentin_ , “tell me, what do you, what do you like, what—”

“I—” Quentin barely managed, groaned at the sound of Eliot dropping his belt to the floor, tried again even as Eliot paused his hands at the button of his pants. “Whatever you want, whatever—I’m good with—”

Eliot laughed hotly into the crook of his neck and Quentin sagged against the wall, sure he could feel it with every nerve in his body. “Come on, Q, be a little selfish.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Quentin cried out as Eliot unzipped his jeans, “Eliot—” And it felt so good to taste the name in his mouth like that, so good to call out his own desire the shape of which he was only starting to know, that he said it again like an incantation, “Eliot,” and then it came spilling out of him after a lifetime of hiding from his own longing, “I want—anything, everything, I want all of it—”

And Eliot laughed again and said, “Okay, let’s start here,” and sank to his knees and opened his mouth and Quentin was undone.

*

After they lay in bed curled toward each other, legs entwined, unwilling to stop looking at or to stop touching each other. Quentin felt giddy and languid and a little bit smug. He wanted to keep everything of this moment: Eliot’s dark curls damp against his face with sweat and the birthmark below his navel to the left and the wonderful thick hair trailing beneath and his eyes, his eyes, how they caught the light and shone with a gladness so complete Quentin could scarcely believe it was for him. He had the illogical thought that someone glancing in outside the window would see the two of them glowing with what he had no name for but love.

Eliot brushed a strand of Quentin’s hair behind his ear and Quentin loved his hand and the softness of the gesture and the way Eliot watched himself do it, like he too was still amazed that this was now allowed. “The fucked-up part,” Eliot said, speaking slowly, “is that until not that long ago—like really up through sometime after Blackspire—I really think I was still that guy who thought that this was the part where I was supposed to play it cool. You know. Or else the other person would win, or some such bullshit.” He bit his lip. Quentin wanted to cradle the confession in his hands like a baby bird. “But I am not cool anymore and I _am_ crazy about you and I want you to know that I’m all in, for this. You and me—us—whatever you want that to look like now or ever, I am all the fuck in. I don’t want to hold anything back.”

“El,” Quentin said, awestruck by the magnitude of his offering and how nakedly he was holding it up. “Yes. I mean, me too. Same. All the way in. I—” He hesitated and then he couldn’t hesitate; then he had to say it, to reach where Eliot had led. “Is it too early to say that I love you?”

“I think we’ve waited quite long enough,” Eliot said, “and I—I do. I do love you.” He gave Quentin a long and gentle kiss and then pulled back, some soft wound showing through on his face. “I’ve never said that to anyone—like this, I mean. Obviously Margo knows I love her. But never someone who—someone who had really seen me, this part of me, and could leave.”

“I’m—beyond honored,” Quentin said. “And I’m not going anywhere.” He found Eliot’s hand and wove their fingers together between them.

Eliot smiled. “You did that, you know.”

“Did what?” Quentin said.

Eliot shrugged, eyes ducking briefly away. “Changed me.”

“Eliot,” Quentin said, hushed. He had no words for this.

“When you were gone,” Eliot said, and Quentin could see that each word was an effort he was choosing to make and felt reverent in the face of the weight of this trust, “I mean, yes, I knew that I needed some kind of everyday reason to keep going. What I didn’t say earlier is that there was a part of me that wanted to just—hit the self-destruct button, I mean some days I really, really wanted to. Just… well, you’ve seen it. You know it’s an area in which I have amassed some expertise. But I couldn’t—I didn’t want to do that to your memory, I didn’t want that to be how I remembered this person who had made me—braver, and better, and more real. Just by being so brave and so real.” His voice cracked. Quentin’s heart seized with tenderness.

“I love you,” he said, because he could and because he had no other response. “And I feel like—I mean on the one hand, that’s beautiful, and I’m so—it means so much that you would share that with me. But also, like… you should give yourself some credit. From where I’m standing you’ve always been amazing. And if you think I’m brave, I think that’s because—you make it easier. Not even to be brave, but to—just be.”

Eliot brought Quentin’s knuckles to his mouth. “Maybe.”

“More than maybe,” Quentin said. “And for what it’s worth—I still think you’re cool.”

“Mm,” Eliot said, relaxing into a smile, “but how would you know?”

Quentin grinned, pleased with the old joke, and Eliot pulled him close, then, and kissed his forehead and held him against his chest, and Quentin breathed in the scent and heat of him and the memory of how they had come together and thought that he could feel somewhere in the dark places he was sure were sealing up the first shy upward growth of something like the future, which seemed suddenly less like an abyss and more like a place in which whatever its ordeals he would not be alone.

*

Nighttime at the penthouse, some months into the nightmare and some weeks back to himself although already by then time had begun to blur and distort around the blood and the shocks and the loss which refused either to complete itself or become less total. Quentin sleepless had gone out to smoke by the big living room window. When Julia in her near-silent bare feet appeared they mutually terrified each other in shock before cascading into _sorry_ — _I just thought_ — _I didn’t think anyone was_ — _I know_ — _it’s okay_. And _It’s okay_ , Julia repeated, as though either of them were still capable of conceiving of a world made tolerable. She asked for a light and they stood there smoking in the dark. He didn’t know if it was the night or the desperation or that it had been weeks at that point since he had last slept more than a handful of hours or just that being up past midnight in a nice apartment with Julia triggered some bizarre nostalgic longing for sleepovers past but he wound up telling her everything: the time key and the mosaic and what he had carried back with him, grief and a child and what had felt in that moment with Eliot like the answer to a question about himself he had never known to ask. _I mean, he was right, it was crazy, but—_ Crazy, but: no matter how staunchly he outlined his own irrationality he had never been able to put the impulse aside. _I don’t know Eliot well_ , she said, _but I know you, and I think_ — _I know that if something feels like it matters to you, it matters for a reason._ At that his throat tightened with the intense desire to cry. It would be a long time—would be perhaps until now when the moon rose while Eliot slept draped across his body—before he would understand why: how much it had hurt to glimpse his own truth in that time when its discovery was so touched by their season of mourning.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The second section of this chapter (first to second asterisk) comes with a warning for suicidal thinking and briefly mentioned issues with body image.

Eliot stayed through the end of the week, a plan secured as soon as he breathed it against Quentin’s skin in the pale morning. Quentin joined him on a shopping excursion for wardrobe fortification and took absurd pleasure in Eliot’s mock exasperation with his physical inability to hold an opinion on the selection of a shirt. Even he noticed though that the clothes Eliot picked were not precisely the clothes he had always worn, and he wondered about that, if it reflected some distance Eliot felt or wanted to create between him and his past self, what exactly it was that Eliot had once sought in vests and neatly pressed slacks which no longer fit or served him. He thought about asking and then considered with the same shock that kept echoing in his chest that they would have time, days, months, years, to unveil for each other their hidden parts, and decided to wait.

On that first morning he walked into the kitchen to find Julia having picked up Eliot’s jacket from where they had left it the previous evening on the floor in their haste and hung it pointedly next to the chair where she now sat with eyebrows perched for gossip. He was so stupidly excited to for once in their lives have something worth reporting that it tripped out of his mouth: “Eliot stayed over—I mean we hooked up—I think we’re dating now? It happened really fast—but not like _too_ fast, and if you think about it actually, like chronologically in some ways it’s not fast at all—”

“This sounds like good news,” Julia said, a slight laugh in her tone.

“Yeah,” Quentin said. A smile broke across his face. “Yeah, I think it’s really good news.”

The three of them went out for dinner and sat around the apartment showing off favorite tiny spells (Eliot charmed a paperweight to play and dance to Pitbull; Julia threw a star map onto the ceiling; Quentin lit a candle that smelled to each person like their favorite dessert and melted with perfect evenness under a fire that did not burn human skin) and discussed recent shifts in the Fillorian economy. It was clear that in his absence and perhaps (another thought he put aside for sometime in all that future he and Eliot would have) because of the long ordeal of bringing him back Eliot and Julia had developed between them an affectionate camaraderie, a teasing undercurrent and instinct for how their jokes would land, that made Quentin warm to see. Some nights later they were watching _Velvet Goldmine_ which Eliot loved and Quentin and Julia had never seen and Quentin was sitting sideways on the couch with his feet pointed toward Julia and his back leaning against Eliot with one of Eliot’s arms around his waist, and he couldn’t believe in that moment how glad he was to be in this place with these two people; he thought he might never have been so glad to be somewhere in his life. When Julia left Friday morning for her sister’s wedding in Rhode Island Eliot kissed her on the cheek and she hugged Quentin and whispered, “I’m really happy for you.”

He tightened his arms around her and hoped she would understand. Then she was gone and he and Eliot fucked noisily on the living room floor.

When they were finished and Quentin was wondering how it was that his life had overnight come to encompass so much fond gazing without even the suggestion of embarrassment, Eliot rolled over on his side propping up his head. “So, I did tell Margo I would help her this weekend.”

“Fillory?” Quentin said.

“Family,” said Eliot, making a face. Quentin made a sympathetic _oof_ noise. “Although there were intimations of tensions needing to be soothed among some of the northern forest settlements. I can beg off, though. I’m sure she’d understand, especially with you being alone here. Nothing to talk to, no one to do.”

“What? No,” Quentin said. Lightly he touched Eliot’s cheek. “No, you should go.” As much as he was stating it like the obvious, internally he was pleased to discover how easily his love held space for the rest of Eliot’s life.

Eliot was studying him. “You sure?”

“I’ll be fine,” Quentin said. “And Margo’s missed you enough for a lifetime. Besides, you and me—we’ll see each other soon, right?” He smiled to show that for him it wasn’t a question.

Eliot smiled back. “Yeah. We will.”

“So let’s get ourselves decent, and make pancakes, and I can tell you all the things I’ll miss about you while you’re gone—”

“I know you’re making fun of my vanity,” said Eliot, “but I will take that.”

“—and then, you know, maybe next week I’ll come over, or you’ll come back, or—we’ll figure something out.” Quentin chewed his lip, considering how to phrase his next words. “The fact that I can even—I can even think about next week, and even kind of after that, and think about what I might _want_ to do there, or I guess then—I feel the most—I don’t know, the most _me_ or the best or—it’s good. It’s really good, El.” He leaned in to place a chaste kiss on his mouth. “You’ve always been good at making me feel good.”

“Okay,” Eliot said, and kissed Quentin back a little deeper before hoisting himself up in one graceful motion. “Now what was that you said about pancakes?”

When they were kissing goodbye, and saying goodbye, and kissing goodbye again at the door, though, Eliot kept lingering with a hint of concern.

“You’re sure you’ll be okay here,” he said.

“I’ll be _fine_ ,” Quentin said again, amicably shoving him into the hall. “Seriously.”

He really believed it, at the time.

*

In the afternoon Quentin was reading on the couch and noticed that in these shortening days the sun had already set so much it was becoming effortful to discern the words. He thought that he should stand to turn on the tall lamp on the other side of the end table. Some minutes later he noticed that he had not moved and had kept rereading the same dimming sentence over and over. He thought again that he should turn on the lamp. He should turn on the lamp but the mechanism which connected the thought to his body seemed to be presenting signs of damage which struck him suddenly as a metaphor for his life: he should turn on the lamp like he should get a degree or a job or some other marker of purpose and value which would enable him to exist as something other than a smudge on other people’s lives, sitting here in the darkening evening alone and with another useless night staring at him…

“Just turn on the fucking lamp,” he said out loud. In the empty room his voice sounded irritable and strangely hollow.

He did turn on the lamp. Then he nodded briefly as though to confirm that he had done it and resumed his perch on the couch and his spot in the book.

_Soothed again, but only soothed to deeper gloom, Ahab, who had sterned off from the whale, sat intently watching his final wanings from the now tranquil boat. For that strange spectacle observable in all sperm whales dying—the turning sunwards of the head, and so expiring—that strange spectacle, beheld of such a placid evening, somehow to Ahab conveyed a wondrousness unknown before…._

Quentin could not make sense of the words. He thought that perhaps he was losing concentration as a result of not having eaten since Eliot had left which would indicate that whatever his body felt it might be time to fix himself dinner; there were some take-out curries and rice left over in the fridge which he could heat up. He sat staring dumbly at the words that refused to cohere and feeling an unaccountable twinge of something between sadness and guilt, the familiar and persistent sense of _wrongness_ , the conviction that something was broken in the world and he the one who had broken it, like he had broken Julia with his insecurity and Alice with his incapacity and Eliot with his stubbornness and all of magic through his idiotic pursuit of some mirage of heroism at all costs, Quentin Coldwater who would allow anyone to pay any price to sustain the illusion he himself barely believed of himself as someone brave or even as someone decent or even as someone whose existence was justified—

“It’s happening again,” he said to try to make himself feel bolder. The heat was on but his body felt cold. “It’s, it’s just the thing, the coming back from the dead thing, I’ve been through it before, it’s a side effect—”

—side effects and symptoms, the same long story he had been telling himself to stave off what would at least indicate some maturity which was an acceptance of the reality that in fact this was who he was and this was the place where he properly belonged which was to say a nothing place populated by no one—

“—it’s just,” he continued, voice shaking now, trying to speak louder, “it’s because I was feeling so good, with Eliot, and it’s some kind of post-resurrection emotional Newton’s third law thing, opposite and equal—”

—as though his time with Eliot had been something real, as though it could have meant anything to Eliot beyond a couple of pity fucks, _did you think it was, what, something beautiful or some equally humiliating concept, like a child, you thought he fucking wanted you, how could you be so stupid_ , a tremor was beginning to spread through his limbs, he was so cold, _no one wants you, asshole, and eventually they’ll get sick of feeling sorry for you and you’ll die alone like your father—_

“No,” he said, “it’s not, it’s not true, Eliot—” But he found that he couldn’t finish this sentence. He bit his lip until he tasted blood trying to keep himself from shedding the tears that had begun to sting his eyes and when they overflowed he bit harder because he could not resist the logic which said as it had told him often before that for someone as wretched as he pain was the only natural and deserved state of being. Then he dug the heels of his palms into his eyes and started to cry.

Because only a few hours ago he had been floating on what had seemed at the time and for several days a novel and magnificent confidence and belief but when he reached now for those memories to steady himself it was like trying to grasp mist and he did not understand how his own mind could be so treacherous as to rob the memories of their life and so faced with that incomprehensibility he could only conclude what made infinitely more sense with everything he had ever understood himself to be which was that in fact it all had been a lie or a trick not from malice but out of some misguided compassion or passing fancy or who the fuck knew why anyone did what they did _you don’t understand anything about other people which is why you can’t connect with other people and you don’t understand anything about other people because you don’t care about anything except the trap of your own self-imposed misery_ but the fact remained that actually it was impossible now to understand himself as a person who could be loved by Eliot or by anyone, it was impossible to believe that anyone would want the body he hated, how it betrayed his weakness, bloated and hidden behind sweatshirts and unbuttoned jeans home for winter break after a semester spent self-medicating _useless_ with warm beer and dry bread from the dining hall shoved in his mouth at three in the morning, hollowed out and angular with bones jutting out like visible warnings of his instability the next spring _unwanted and unwantable_ buying Adderall from his roommate’s dealer to scramble making up for the credits he had lost, the humiliation of having his malfunction broadcast _broken_ so publicly and in such close proximity to Julia who had known him long enough to read his unwellness instantly the humiliation of which burned his face with shame to remember which was only one of several reasons why he had spent so many hours of April that year thinking about a bottle of pills or else a blade—

—his body was cold somewhere in the bones and marrow but his skin was hot like flame on his face and it was becoming difficult even beyond the shuddering sobs to breathe—

—he couldn’t believe he had let Eliot run his hand over the scarred skin of his thigh _a bottle of pills or else a blade_ he couldn’t believe he had told Eliot he loved him _what the fuck do you know about love_ or any of the ways they had touched each other or _selfish_ how soft and easy it had felt to live _the way it is for other people_ he couldn’t believe that his body could contain both the space for such an intoxicating delusion and _idiot stupid_ the horrifying inarguable clarity of _fucking waste of space piece of shit_ this emptiness or void which felt itself like some nightmarish premonition of death _a blade or a rope or a bottle of pills_ he coughed with a violent burn all the way down to his lungs and when he pulled his hand away he saw blood and felt a lurching fear laced with the inevitability that this was how he should end _finally_ coming apart in someone else’s home _alone like your father_ he couldn’t believe—

—he couldn’t stop coughing and his head was pounding and an ache was spreading through his joints and he was so fucking cold and he could see the pictures inside his head now _a bottle of pills_ he couldn’t believe it had taken him so long _die alone like your father_ to run out the patience of others and the prospect of _selfish stupid ugly piece of shit_ demanding more or of waiting for them to discover his fraud _time bomb waiting to blow yourself up_ —

—he was cold and his head hurt _a blade or a rope_ like there was a stake through it or as though someone had implanted in him a bomb and he needed—

—he needed—

—he wanted to fucking die—

—he wanted to die but he had been here before and it was familiar terrain and perhaps that meant that he was right and this was his home _useless ugly everyone knows_ and perhaps his inexorable return meant that this dirt was the dirt he was bred from and made for _a creature that only wants monstrous in your desperation_ perhaps this was in fact his destiny but there was _everyone else has figured it out_ a protocol to be followed _nobody else needs this much_ which meant that he needed _a bottle of pills_ he needed, he needed his phone, he felt in his pockets and remembered he had left it charging on the kitchen counter in that other lifetime where he had believed _fucking worthless_ he had been loved—

—he couldn’t believe he had killed his father for something that would never love him back—

—he half-lunged and half-fell off the couch, stumbling almost immediately to the floor where he doubled over coughing on his knees and he thought _pathetic stupid_ he thought _they’ll all leave you_ he thought of the therapist he had seen in high school and how _die alone like your father when you killed him_ she had told him many things of which he had failed to make use but she had explained the protocol which he was now following _a blade or a rope or a bottle of pills_ and she had told him that any reason to live was a good one if it kept him alive _everyone else knows how to live_ and so he began to list One he could not leave a corpse for Julia to find _got your best friend sexually assaulted_ Two it would be impolite to die without a note which with his shaking hands he was in no position to compose _embarrassing broken and everyone knows_ Three what if the others got it into their heads that this was related to the magic with which they had brought him back and thus attempted to solve the problem again and in the process this time got seriously hurt _never love you back_ Four _unwanted and unwantable_ Four _ugly stupid piece of shit_ Four _alone like your father_

Four he could always die tomorrow if he really wanted to—

—it took everything in him or maybe everything he had ever had _pathetic and alone_ to rise to his feet and walk _a creature that wants_ to the kitchen where time seemed to dilate and stretch _unwanted unwantable_ as he got his bearings _a bottle of pills_ leaning on the island until he spotted _ugly stupid useless wrong_ his phone lying on the counter next to _broken and everyone knows_ the wooden block of expensive knives _or else a blade_ which he stared at transfixed for a long moment in which a horrifying shiver _die like your father_ of terror and desire passed through him _waste of space_ until with as much strength it seemed as he had ever summoned _piece of shit_ he reached forward as though through water and grabbed the phone and managed somehow to unlock the screen.

*

The river pulsed wildly, whitecaps whipping themselves in and out of existence in the storm. The rain was so cold it stung his face and neck and hands and pouring so hard Quentin felt certain that after enough time out here he could bruise. The darkness blacked out everything but the river and the ground in front of him and his own dirty scraped-up hands although it seemed also that this was a landscape void of life or shape or any markers that might signify where he was. He did not want to be here but he had lost something important and it was here that it would be found.

On his hands and knees in the mud he dug desperately and without direction not knowing what it was and not knowing where he had left it or why but knowing that he needed to find it and soon. The certainty of his lack rose up in him like a wound and with it fear at the consequences of leaving or even continuing much longer without it. There was a bridge of wood and knotted rope leading across the river and he understood suddenly that the important thing was on the other side. He had left it and the river had separated them, cleaving their distance ever more strongly as the rain fell and the waters rose. Soon it seemed the plain would flood.

He needed to retrieve it but there on the opposite bank it was guarded or held by the sinister presence who paced relentlessly across the land. Quentin could sense as much as see the presence by its effects on him which were a kind of repulsed nausea coupled with a humiliated quaking terror. Lightning flashed and Quentin could see now that the figure had the shape of a man although in the impossible dark of night in the storm he could not discern any features. But he did not need to see to know that the figure was someone loathsome whom he feared and despised in equal measure. As someone borne of Quentin’s own wrongdoing he was Quentin’s responsibility and his enemy. The figure made him sick as he knew the figure had always made him sick since the figure had dealt him some long-ago injury which refused to heal, sick with his own terror and his own deep and abiding hatred.

*

“We ask that visitors walk at all times as a matter of safety—”

“Excuse me—”

“Ma’am, _please_ slow down—”

The door to his room swung open and Julia barrelled in and to his bedside, eyes red from crying. “Q,” she said, voice shaking, touching his face as though to prove to herself he was real. Her eyes took in the sight of him in the bed with the heart rate monitor and the clear IV drip they had inserted to restore fluids.

“Hey, Jules,” he managed weakly. His physical symptoms had begun to abate some hours ago, on what he was fairly sure was Monday morning, but three days of a hacking cough and a stomach that refused to settle had shredded his voice.

“I got home,” she said, “and you weren’t there, and you hadn’t texted, and you weren’t picking up your cell, and I had this—this _feeling_ —” Her voice started horribly to crack. “And I thought I was probably being paranoid, but in case I wasn’t I ran a quick locator spell, and it said you were—” She looked around the room in dismay as though to gesture towards everything it might have meant. “You were in a _hospital_ , and you hadn’t told me you were fucking going, and I thought—I don’t know what I thought—well yes I fucking do know what I thought—Q, what happened?” She had begun to cry but was efficiently and determinedly wiping her eyes like she didn’t want him to be distracted by it which made him feel worse.

“I’m sorry, Jules,” he said. He tried to select the most palatable version of events. “I just—I wasn’t feeling well, kind of like a flu thing, and I thought maybe I had a fever, so I figured just in case—”

“Quentin I love you,” said Julia, “but you are the worst fucking liar I have ever met and I am too fucking freaked out to be nice about this right now. I need you to tell me straight, no bullshit: what _happened_?”

“I—” He closed his eyes. She deserved to know; of course she deserved to know. In some ways she already knew. But god it would sting to tell her, again, after everything she had done for him. “I was feeling—not great—on a couple different levels—and I thought, probably—probably I should… be not, um. Unsupervised. For a while.”

“Jesus.” For one moment he could see the information hit her like a blow and he wished he could erase everything about him that had brought him to this point. Then she composed her face and nodded briskly, back in her habitual pragmatism. “Okay. Okay.”

“I mean I didn’t do anything,” Quentin said. “And I did feel really sick. Feverish, nauseous, couldn’t stop coughing. Like killer pneumonia mixed with the stomach flu. I called a car to take me here and it was kind of a toss-up honestly what I was going to check myself in for. Then I puked up blood and passed out at the desk, so. That kind of answered that question.”

“God,” Julia said.

“Yeah,” he said. “That part of it started getting better this morning. I think by now it probably looks worse than it is. Confused the shit out of some medical professionals, though. They said they’re sending in a diagnostic specialist to look at this thing that didn’t show up on any tests or respond to any treatment and then mysteriously cured itself.”

“Okay,” said Julia. “Good.” She chewed at her lip, an old nervous habit which sent through him an unaccountable wave of nostalgia. “What about the other part?”

He didn’t know how to answer. The truth was that his physical exhaustion was such that he had for some time lacked the energy for the kind of spiraling rumination that had sent him into the hospital in the first place, but as much as he wanted to believe it had abated in the interim he had no idea whether it lay in wait for him around the next bend, which it struck him was to some degree always true. _Time bomb_. When he closed his eyes he still saw the river’s edge drawing ever closer to his feet.

In response to his silence Julia said not ungently, “That seems like a not so much.”

Quentin nodded minutely. His cheeks were hot with shame.

“Okay,” she said. “Do you—when you get out of here, do you want to go check in… somewhere else?”

He gave a rueful laugh which turned into a cough. “I don’t know that it’s ever a matter of _wanting_ to.”

“Q, be serious,” she said.

“I am,” he said. “I don’t want to. But I also don’t want to—you know.” It felt only marginally less humiliating to omit the word than it would have to say it loud.

“Well, do you think you need to?” said Julia.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Do you think it would help?” she said.

 _Nothing ever helps_ , he stopped himself from saying because it was something one could not state in the presence of others. Instead again he said “I don’t know.”

Julia studied him for a long moment, breathing deeply through her nose. “Okay. We’ll get you home, I’ll clear my schedule, and either you won’t feel better and that’ll answer that question, or you will and we can talk about what to do next when your head is a little clearer.”

“What?” Quentin said. “No, Julia, I can’t ask you to—”

“You’re not asking me for shit,” she said.

“It’s fine, I can find an inpatient facility—”

“Jesus _Christ_ ,” she said, and for a second she looked truly angry. “What part of this don’t you get? My best friend, who _died_ , is sick, and yes I am going to do everything in my goddamn power to keep him safe this time. I mean, shit, forget your brain, what if you start fucking _coughing up blood_ again? What if you don’t make it to a phone next time? Something serious is going on and we need to figure out what.”

“But—” He could understand in certain ways that she was right and he felt guilty over it and guilty over the image of Julia shackling herself to his unwellness and guiltier still that he could not stop running his mouth about his own guilt. “You’re talking about dropping your whole life, and I just—” He almost said _couldn’t live with myself_ but recognized in time that it would be in this circumstance a poor choice of words.

Julia’s mouth was set in a thin line of frustration and concern but she seemed not to want to argue with him any longer. “Fine. I can talk to the others, see if they can drop by. I won’t tell them—I can just say you’ve been having some weird side effects that we want to keep an eye on. Does that work?”

“Okay,” he said. He hated the idea of bringing the others in to witness his own unspooling but not as much as he hated the idea of Julia putting her life on hold for his meager simulacrum of one. Finally he remembered to say, “Thank you.”

“Of course,” she said. She took his hand and squeezed. “Q—”

At that moment there was a knock on the door which shortly thereafter swung open. In walked a tall man in a lab coat with a broad professional smile and a youthful stride. “Hi there,” he said in a resonant baritone, “I’m Dr. Takeuchi.” He shook hands with Julia and Quentin as they introduced themselves.

“You’re the diagnostic specialist?” Quentin asked.

“Sure am,” said the doctor. He glanced at Julia. “If you wouldn’t mind giving us some privacy—”

“She can stay,” Quentin said.

Takeuchi raised an eyebrow. “I’m going to be asking some pretty intimate questions.” He held up his right hand with the little finger crossed front, thumb crooked against the base of the index, and brought the second and third fingers of the left hand to the underside of the wrist—the starting position, Quentin realized with surprise, for Popper 24.

By way of response Julia completed the spell, sending a little arc of energy across the room with—her own flair—a soft purple glow.

The doctor blinked. “Well, alright then. She can stay.”

“Wait, you’re a magician?” Quentin said. He and Julia exchanged sharp hopeful glances.

“Yep,” said Takeuchi. “You would not believe the amount of people who have no idea they’ve landed in the emergency room because of curses, hexes, vengeful ex-boyfriend fucked with your runes. Not to mention dumbass magicians playing with shit they shouldn’t be playing with. As far as my colleagues know, I’m an expert on astronomically rare diseases. Which, for what it’s worth, I am. But something tells me your case is magic-related in origin.” He drew out of his pocket what looked like a triangle of rose-tinted sea-glass and began to inspect Quentin through it. “Have any unusual encounters lately? Vampires, selkies, a casting gone wrong? Drink any untested potions, or use any salves past the expiration date?”

“I came back from the dead a while ago,” Quentin said. “Does that count?”

“We’ve all been there,” said Takeuchi. “But seriously.”

“He’s not kidding,” said Julia.

“Listen, I’m trying to help here,” said Takeuchi.

“We are dead serious,” said Quentin. “Pun not intended.”

Takeuchi narrowed his eyes at him skeptically. Then he walked over to a drawer and pulled out what looked like a pregnancy test. “Tell me that again,” he said, holding it in front of Quentin’s face.

“Uh, okay,” said Quentin. “A while ago, I died, and my friends brought me back to life.”

Two little pink lines appeared in the center oval of the stick.

“Holy shit,” Takeuchi breathed, eyes wide. “And you haven’t published about this?”

“It was kind of a one-off,” Julia demurred.

“Holy shit,” Takeuchi repeated, staring at the results.

“I died in the Mirror Realm?” Quentin offered.

“If we could maybe focus on what’s going on now,” Julia said, “so he doesn’t, you know. Die again.”

Takeuchi shook himself. “Right. Okay. But listen, if you do decide you want to submit to some journals, and you want thoughts on which ones, or you need some help writing it up—”

“You’ll be the first to know,” Julia said, with a wide steely smile Quentin knew was her way of saying the conversation was over.

Takeuchi resumed the exam, scanning Quentin through a variety of lenses and casting a handful of semi-obscure revealing spells. At one point he took out something which would have been a stethoscope had not the drum been replaced wtih a conch shell and held it to Quentin’s forehead, listening with a light frown.

“Nothing’s coming up,” he said finally. “No poxes, no meridians out of line, no spell residue of any kind whatsoever.”

Quentin felt an unexpected sting of disappointment. He hadn’t realized how badly he wanted to hear unambiguously that whatever was wrong with him had some identifiable exogenous cause. “Oh.”

“You been experiencing any other symptoms?” Takeuchi said, gazing with one eye closed through a scrap of wire mesh as though hoping to discover something he had missed.

“Uh, headaches, nausea, I guess,” he said. “What I guess you could call depressed mood. Lack of energy.”

“Huh,” Takeuchi said. He rolled the mesh up and stuck it in the front pocket of his lab coat. “This isn’t really my area of expertise, but have you considered that it’s psychosomatic? I mean I assume dying’s gotta be pretty traumatic, right?”

“Yeah, thanks,” Quentin said, avoiding Julia’s eyes. “I’ll look into that.”

*

Margo passed on word that Eliot had on assignment to the After Islands wound up somehow incommunicado following a storm but gave assurance that bringing him back into contact was a top priority of the court. Quentin was half disappointed as he did very much want to see Eliot again and soon and half relieved that he would not yet have to confront Eliot with the severity of his dysfunction. In the meantime feeling like a child avoiding his baby-sitter he leaned into Julia’s line to the others that he had been feeling physically unwell and pretended in the next several days to sleep through shifts taken by Josh and Penny; he learned after the fact that he had in fact slept through a brief visitation from Alice. When he woke though half an hour past when Julia had mentioned Margo was meant to arrive some impulse of friendship or dignity or perhaps unexamined sexism stirred him to rouse himself and get ready to greet her in decent clothes.

But it was Kady he found typing on her phone at the kitchen table.

“Oh,” he said. “I mean, hi.”

She glanced up. “Nice to see you, too.”

“No, it is, I—” He ran a hand through his hair. “Sorry. I was just expecting—”

“Margo got delayed with some Fillory shit,” Kady said. “She’s on her way, but I was around, so.”

“Oh,” Quentin said again, and then, belatedly: “Thanks.” He stood there recalling that only a short while ago he had wanted to reconnect with her and failing to reconcile that with his inability to come up with anything to do now except awkwardly shift his weight from foot to foot.

He was steeling himself for another conversational attempt when Kady said, “How are you feeling?”

“Uh, you know,” he said. “Been better. You?”

She shrugged. “Been worse.” Then she dug into the black leather bag hanging from the chair. “Asking because I did bring these—” She held up a pack of playing cards. “ _If_ you’re up for a beatdown. And I do mean a crushing one.”

The uncharacteristic niceness of the gesture startled Quentin into saying, “Yeah, okay.” He tried for a smile. “I think I can handle a round or two of kicking your ass.”

Kady snorted. “I’d like to fucking see it,” she said, starting to deal.

In truth they were roughly evenly matched. Quentin knew himself to have a certain level of cleverness and finesse, but Kady unsurprisingly played so offensively that he found himself needing to adjust his strategy on the fly. When the card she laid out transfigured itself at the last moment into a holographic Charizard—“Missing the rarity symbol,” he clarified, “you could score a couple thousand off it”—she gave a begrudging laugh. They played until Kady noted that drops of water had begun to leak from the faucet in the kitchen sink in sets which corresponded to the Fibonacci sequence at which point they took a break to let the probability magic dissipate before something worse happened to Julia’s apartment. Kady rolled a joint and they sat on the couch passing it back and forth and shaping smoke rings with magic.

“Can I ask you something?” Quentin said, tongue loosened by the weed.

Kady took a drag, held it, released it in the shape of thought bubble. “You can _ask_.”

“What did Julia tell you?” he said. “About me, I mean.”

“That you’d been having these weird symptom flare-ups,” she said. “Possibly related to the whole being dead thing. Said there’d been a recent one and you needed someone to keep an eye on it in case things took a turn for the worse.” She eyed him sharply. “But to answer what you really want to know, it’s not that hard to read between the lines, if you happen to have some familiarity with…”

“With me?” Quentin said.

Her mouth twisted into something that was not quite a smile. “With fucking wanting to die.”

“Oh.” He took a deep inhale, feeling the scrape at the back of his throat, grateful to be stoned in this moment where the words would land somewhere a little to the left. When he exhaled it came out like a bolt of lightning. “Why are you here,” he blurted out.

She laughed. “Do you say that to all the girls?”

“No, I mean—” His thoughts were tripping over themselves, not wholly unpleasantly, as he fumbled for what in fact he meant. “I mean it’s nice. Of you. But you don’t—we’ve never exactly been close, you don’t owe me anything. I…”

Kady was silent for a long moment and he wondered if he’d pissed her off. She took a long drag which she breathed out like a curved and intricate streak of frost. “I’ve thought about that question a lot,” she said finally. “What I owe and who I owe it to. I spent a long fucking time paying off other people’s debts and throwing myself at other people’s problems. And eventually I was like, I’m done. No more saving people who don’t want to be saved, no more monsters, no more stupid fucking quests. But by that point I didn’t really know how to do anything else, so I was like—” She rolled her eyes. “Well, okay, time to die, I guess.”

Quentin laughed out of some strange relief in familiarity, then caught himself. “Sorry, I don’t know why—”

“It’s a little funny,” she said. “Now. But I thought those were my options, right? Spend another couple decades letting the universe dick me around, or die. And I was really leaning towards the second one.”

“But you didn’t,” said Quentin.

“Yeah,” she said. “I found a third option.”

Quentin considered this or attempted to; he was a few drags past the point of internal coherence. “What was it?”

“The third option was, _I_ choose,” said Kady. “I choose what I do. I choose who I do it for. And I fucking choose what matters to me.”

“And what’s that?” he asked.

“Honestly?” she said. “I’m still figuring it out.” Her mouth curled slightly into a smile which looked uncharacteristically soft on her face. “For a while there I so over everything, I really thought it was going to turn out that I was some like, total hedonist deep down inside. Just—fuck you people, I’m finally getting mine. I had a couple _wild_ -ass weeks. But it turns out I actually do want to be part of life. Just… on my terms.” She turned to look at him. “So to get back to your question… You’re right. I don’t owe you shit. When Julia found me and said she had a _plan_ , I told her to go fuck herself. But I came around because I kept thinking about it, thinking about you, and I realized that believe it or not—and I almost didn’t believe it—after everything we’ve pulled, I actually trust you. And I don’t take that shit lightly.” She took a last inhale, then snuffed the joint out on an ashtray shaped like a leaf. “Does that answer your question?”

It did and it didn’t. It was hard in his current state to consider himself someone worthy of trust. But he knew that it was good of her to say it. “Yeah,” he said. “And, uh—thanks, for. You know. Everything.”

“Yeah, okay,” she said. “Do you know where the remote is?”

They wound up eating ice cream and watching an old episode of _It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia_ or in Quentin’s case half-watching it while thoughts percolated and extinguished themselves more or less harmlessly until the buzzer rang. “That’ll be Margo,” Quentin said, picking up their bowls and standing to buzz her in.

“I should get going,” Kady said, getting to her feet. “But hey—it was good to see you.”

“Yeah,” Quentin said. Then he added uncertainly, “I’ll—see you again soon, I hope.”

“Definitely,” she said, and cuffed him lightly on the shoulder before letting herself out.

As he washed the dishes sobering up he noticed that it felt easy enough to wipe the bowls out with the sponge and it felt nice to run the hot water over his hands and it felt possible indeed to consider seeing Kady again and he was looking forward too to Margo’s arrival. He had been here before, he remembered, and he had crawled out of the wreckage of his own mind, twice just recently, and the route was arduous and long and hardly linear but he had made the journey before which suggested he might make it again. He was beginning to feel better, he realized or decided with relief; he thought he ought to text Julia and let her know that it was in all likelihood going to be fine.

The doorbell rang and on a whim he unlocked it with magic and called, “It’s open.”

“El sends his love,” Margo said as she came in. “We found him and his crew wandering stoned off their gourds in the Flying Forest somehow but he’s en route to the castle ergo to Earth ASAP. Thank god for both of us because I am not convincing playing good cop. Please tell me you have wine.” 

“Yeah, gimme a sec,” he said, smiling in appreciation of her refusal to show deference to circumstance. Quickly he turned off the sink and opened the cabinet with the wineglasses.

“You would not _believe_ what those cumstains in Loria are trying to pull on us,” she continued. “And you know, I really thought we’d finally gotten to a good place. I thought we’d reached an understanding that actually it’s a mutually beneficial situation when both parties involved make the conscious adult decision to _not be total cocks_ to each other. But no, Ess has his ballsack full of daddy issues to act out about like some teen drama reject, and he wants Fillory to take the money shot.”

He walked over to the door where she was bending down to unlace her tall black boots. “Sounds stressful.”

“I can’t even tell you,” she said, stepping out of her second shoe, “but I’m gonna power through.” She lifted her head, swiped the glass, straightened up, and took a long sip in one even motion so graceful Quentin was impressed. “First, though—” But he never found out what she was going to say first because at that moment she turned to face him for the first time with a warm smirk that disappeared into disturbed shock as she met his eyes and dropped the wineglass on the floor.

“Margo,” he said, worried, “are you okay? What’s—”

“Holy shit, kid,” she said, eyeing him up and down, “we have to get you to the fairies, like _now_.”


	5. Chapter 5

“So exactly what is it you see?” Julia said.

They were in a carriage in Fillory on the way to a meadow which had been designated an official fairy-human meeting ground. Eliot had been rerouted there mid-return and would likely be waiting for them when they arrived. Quentin sat next to Julia. Across from them Margo sat regally upright, looking the picture of a queen at rest except for her hand which clutched Josh’s tightly enough that Quentin inferred he had come along as moral support. Somewhere beneath the haze of his brain and the past several hectic hours and whatever thing it was that Margo had seen through her fairy eye he was touched that Margo cared enough to be unsteadied.

“Fairy sight is so fucking trippy it makes being on shrooms look like _Downton Abbey_ ,” Margo said. “It’s not, like, shapes and colors like we see. Or it _is_ that, but all layered over with like, _ideas_ , or… So I can see like a kind of x-ray vision, almost, but not the blood and guts and skeleton kind. I can see shit like your magic, and your Shade, and that stuff that makes you _you_. But it doesn’t stay in one place, it moves around. It’s fluid. And when I look at _him—_ ” She lifted her chin to indicate Quentin. “—his shit is all, like, knotted. Or choked up like a blocked artery. Or—like one of those little Japanese trees, in the trays.”

“A bonsai?” offered Josh.

“Yeah,” Margo said. “But not just the tree itself, like, the tiny-ass pot and the shit they use to keep it fun-sized because trees don’t actually come that small. The, I don’t know. Wires. Pruning shit.”

“So you’re saying my soul,” Quentin said slowly, “is a bonsai tree. But a bonsai tree in progress?”

“I think I wrote a poem like that in eighth grade,” said Josh.

“I’m saying there’s something that wants to grow,” Margo said, “and something else that wants to keep it from growing. And whatever that something else is, it’s got bad vibes. I don’t like the something else at all.”

Quentin considered the previous weeks, his inching steps towards life and the increasingly catastrophic falls that had accompanied them. As much as it sent a chill down his neck to consider that he was playing host to some malignant thing that could not be seen nesting in him like a haunting or a tumor, there was relief too in the idea that it was not merely his habitual malfunctioning which had been manifesting so starkly but in fact all along there had been some anchor dragging him down.

Julia appeared to be thinking along the same lines. “But this is good, right?” she said. “Not that it’s there, whatever it is. But that we know now, and hopefully the fairies can give us some more information, and then we can do whatever we need to do to get rid of it and Quentin will be safe.”

Josh nodded. “Diagnosis, treatment.”

“Yeah,” Margo said, looking unconvinced. She shook her head. “I feel so goddamn stupid. I _knew_ something was off with you when we brought you back, I could see things weren’t where they should be, but I shrugged it off. Figured it was the death thing, and it would just take some extra time for you to stitch yourself back together, or whatever. I should have dragged you over to them day one.”

“In your defense,” Julia said, “I feel like that was a pretty reasonable assumption to make.”

“Yeah, Margo,” Quentin said, “don’t—don’t blame yourself on my account, okay?”

Margo was still looking him over with that concern which was always so close to anger on her face. “We’re gonna fix this, Quentin,” she said. “Whatever it is, whatever it takes, we’re gonna take care of it. I’m not gonna lose you again. You hear me?”

He didn’t know how to respond to such forthright care or how to express how much it did warm him to know that Margo was in his corner. “Thanks,” he managed; then, trying for lightness, “Is this the part where you tell me that if I ever reveal to anyone that you were earnest for like thirty whole seconds, you’ll kill me yourself?”

Margo eased into a smile that had something in it which was complicated and almost sad. “No, kid,” she said. “That part ended a long time ago.”

*

Quentin spotted Eliot out of the carriage window as they were approaching the clearing. Eliot was pacing restlessly while trying to keep his face calm for the trio of fairies standing by a wheeled set of shelves stacked with mysterious implements and Quentin felt the sight of him like something bubbling over in his chest. As the carriage drew close they caught each other’s eyes and for a second Eliot smiled so brightly to see him it was like he’d forgotten why they were here. Disembarking his feet had barely touched the ground before Eliot had raced over and pulled him close.

“God it’s fucking good to see you,” Eliot said.

“Yeah,” Quentin said. He tightened his arms and let himself relish how it felt once again to lean his head against Eliot’s chest.

They stayed there for a long minute until with reluctance Eliot released his grip, although his hands lingered on Quentin’s arms. “I keep trying to shut up the voice in the back of my head,” Eliot said, “because this is like, serious, but in the interest of full disclosure I feel obligated to let you know that it simply will not stop repeating an extremely crass joke about how I can finally check the box on my bucket list marked fucking someone into the hospital.”

Quentin burst out laughing for the first time in days. “Honestly I’m a little surprised it took you this long.”

“I know, right?” said Eliot. Then he stepped back and turned slightly outward, opening the two of them to the world. “So this is the fairy healer, who has so graciously agreed to help us.” He gestured toward the fairy wearing the most elaborate neckline, with shorn hair and hands clasped patiently in front.

Quentin stepped forward, unsure of the proper etiquette. “Thank you for taking the time, sir,” he said, opting for a slight bow of the head, then took a second look and doubted himself. “Er, ma’am. Or—sorry—uh—”

The fairy healer smiled. “The art of healing,” they intoned, “knows no gender.”

“Oh okay,” Quentin said, slightly embarrassed. “That’s… very evolved.”

“And it is an honor,” the healer continued, “to assist a friend of Margo the Liberator.” They nodded at Margo and she returned the gesture. Turning back to Quentin they said, “You were right to bring him to us.” They gazed up and down his body, stepping around to view him from different angles. “Fascinating,” they murmured. “And in a human.” The other fairies who seemed younger and who Quentin supposed were perhaps assistants or apprentices of some kind whispered to each other by the shelves of equipment.

“Is that—bad, or…” Quentin said.

“You were brought back from death, yes?” said the healer.

“Yeah,” said Quentin. “Does this have to do with that?”

The healer came close and held their palm up a few inches away from Quentin’s chest. “May I?”

“Sure,” Quentin said, expecting them to touch him, perhaps feeling for a heartbeat. Instead the healer didn’t move but Quentin could feel—there was no other phrase for it—they were touching his _magic_. As easily as a human might touch his shoulder or his hair and as with those touches it did not feel precisely unpleasant or in any way painful but there was the same awkwardness of contact which was somehow both intimate and coolly professional that one encountered in certain medical examinations.

His face must have given away something of the strangeness of the experience, because Julia said, “Are you okay?” She glanced at the healer like she was gauging whether to intervene.

“Yeah, it’s fine,” Quentin said. “Just—unusual.”

The healer smiled. “Unusual for us, too,” they said. “Outside of emergency situations, only close relations are permitted to reach inside one another in this manner. I apologize for the discomfort.”

“No worries,” he said, trying not to dwell on the phrase _emergency situations_. “Whatever you need to do.”

The healer probed a little longer, exploring the flow of Quentin’s magic, occasionally moving something or temporarily diverting it before setting it back with what Quentin could tell was extraordinary care. Finally they dropped their hand. Quentin tilted forward briefly, off-balance from the shock of being once again alone in himself, and Eliot reached out to steady him.

“There is a curse,” the fairy healer announced, speaking to the group at large. Julia covered her mouth with her hand. “A kind of binding spell, set at the point of resurrection. In the place from which you were brought back, your self had begun to separate and dissolve, as particles in a solution. To bring you back to this realm, these pieces needed to be reunited. But a self is not like a block of salt, which retains its molecular essence up through the point of complete dissolution. For a self, changes in form beget changes in the material itself. And so it was not enough to gather the component parts, although this alone is no simple task. They also needed to be drawn through a process of chronological reversal.”

“Chronological reversal?” Quentin echoed.

“Wound back up through time,” said Julia softly. The three fairies turned their eyes to her. “Almost like you’d wind up a ball of string, only the ball was the version of you that had died. We had to bring them back through all the time that had passed since, until they were as they’d been in the last moment of your life.”

Quentin stared. “Jesus, Jules.” Although he vaguely remembered being told some of logistics of his resurrection early in his time back among the living the story had not penetrated meaningfully through the fog of those days and he had not asked since. Considering it now as a magician he could barely imagine the complexity and daring of what his friends had pulled off.

“Impressive work,” said the healer with a look of admiration. “You should be proud.”

“Thank you,” Julia said, tucking her hair behind her ear. “But—you’re saying there was a problem. A curse?”

“Yes.” The healer nodded. “There was a moment in which the self’s constituent parts were bundled together and held in time at the edge of life in the realm that has no name. It was in passing through the membrane between realms that the parts became one whole—emerging on our side of the divide as the living creature. But this process took time. There was a moment in which the transfer was necessarily incomplete. And in that moment, when part of you was reconstituted in life and part still lingered beyond, a spell was cast which bound the pieces that remained to that other realm.”

It took Quentin a moment to process this. “So part of me is… still dead?”

“Fucking hell,” whispered Margo.

“Part of you is still dead,” said the healer. “But the problem is more pressing than that. A portion of the self is not like a limb. Life seeks motion. Life _is_ motion. While you walk this realm, your life yearns to be lived. But within you the boundary between the realms remains open. And the further your self reaches toward life, the harder the spell pulls you back toward the other side. You will have experienced this already, I believe: periods of flourishing coupled with the encroach of death.”

Quentin nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s kind of uncannily on point, actually.” He exchanged glances with Julia in which both communicated a similar mix of fear and relief.

“So is there a way to fix this?” said Eliot. “A counterspell, a balm, some kind of treatment?”

The healer shook their head. “There is no counterspell. The binding will last until it fulfills its mission: to bring you back to the world beyond.”

Quentin felt cold and oddly numb. So he would die, then; at least, he thought distantly, he would have in this brief reprieve been able to tie up a few loose ends. At least Eliot would know what he had meant to him.

At least it wouldn’t be his fault.

His friends were agitated, he noticed. Margo was arguing. “You people can snap a finger and vivisect a boar, there has to be _something_ you can do.”

“You said the spell worked otherwise,” Julia was saying. “Can we re-do it? Can we close up the boundary?”

“I mean it’s fucking time magic,” said Josh. “Shouldn’t there be like, infinite redos if we get it right?”

Eliot wasn’t saying anything. When Quentin looked at him he realized it was because Eliot was trying not to cry.

The fairy held up a hand. “There are options. Two, by my count. But neither is ideal.”

“Un-ideal is great,” Julia said. “We can work with un-ideal.”

“We’re fucking experts at un-ideal,” said Margo. “Let’s hear it.”

“The first,” said the healer, “would be to reset yourself back to the original condition in which you returned to this world. This is complicated magic, but there are several of my people who would be available to assist. After this point, you would need to remain under strict wards. This would not end the curse, but assuming they were woven tightly enough, the wards would prevent it from progressing.”

“Well, that doesn’t sound so bad,” said Eliot, with a lightness of tone thinly covering desperation. “You cozy up somewhere, get really into interior decorating.”

“It is possible,” the healer said, “that after some time and with the right training, you would be able to maintain the stasis of your own accord, at least for limited periods of time.”

“So that sounds great,” Julia said, looking back and forth between Quentin and the healer. “What’s the downside?”

Quentin considered this. To return to how he had been, to remain that way until his body gave out… “The downside is I wouldn’t—I wouldn’t be me,” he realized. “That’s what was happening when I was staying at Brakebills, I mean that place is warded up to high heaven. I wasn’t dying, but I wasn’t—it was like I wasn’t a real person. If we did that, I’d lose—” Everything, he thought and could not say. But—he looked at Eliot, whose face was sinking with sad understanding—it was true. “That’s hardly a life.”

“Quentin,” Margo said, “isn’t half a life better than nothing?”

“And maybe,” Julia said, “maybe the rest of us could research, and experiment, and after a while we find some way to fix this.”

Quenitn loved her stubbornness in the face of any problem but he could not face it now. “What’s the second option?”

“The second option,” the healer said, “is to find the entity that cast the bind, and convince or force them to lift it. Given the provenance of the curse, the risks for this one seem to go without saying, for anyone involved in the effort.”

“ _Now_ we’re getting somewhere,” Margo said with forced bravado. “So we storm the gates of death, shake down some immortal emo kid on a power trip, run before the shit hits the fan. Sounds like a Tuesday.”

“Very on-brand for us,” said Eliot.

“You guys,” Quentin said, disbelieving, “come on. I can’t ask you to do that for me. You got lucky once, who knows what’ll happen if you keep messing with this?”

“You’re not asking for shit, Coldwater,” Margo said. “Democracy is the new black, and it’s four to one in favor. You’ve been outvoted.”

“What if it’s, like, Hades?” Quentin protested.

“What if?” Julia said with a slightly manic shrug. “Then Hades will have to answer to us.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Is this what I sound like? When I say that we have to do the insane thing? Have I sounded like this the whole time, and no one told me?”

“First of all, people definitely told you,” Eliot said. “Second of all—” His face for a moment was so brutally open Quentin could barely look at it. “Q, you can’t ask us _not_ to do this.”

“I—” He could not live with himself if they got hurt on his behalf and he knew that they could not live with themselves if they left him to die and his stomach turned so with the impossibility of the choice that he thought he might be ill. “El, if you get hurt…”

“Like it’s not going to hurt,” Eliot said, “watching you spend the rest of your life staring at nothing? Knowing that you’ll never—” He clamped his mouth shut.

“Okay, can we investigate a little more?” said Josh, hands held out in a gesture of placation. “Maybe if we have more information, that will help us make a mutually agreeable choice.” He turned to the fairy healer. “Is there anything you can tell us about who cast this spell? Like was it a god, demigod, fellow dead person, rogue Librarian?”

The healer tilted their head, considering. “They left no signature. But sometimes…” They gestured towards the assistants, and one of them plucked off a shelf a quartz-like crystal studded with several gears and rolled it over on a wheeled tray. The healer placed it in front of Quentin and bent down to look through it, adjusting levers and and turning knobs. After one shift they lingered for some time and although fairies tended to embody a peculiar stillness Quentin nevertheless felt a sense of foreboding.

The healer straightened and seemed to take a moment to gather their words. “It is rare,” they began, “for an individual to leave a mark in their spellwork. But for many kinds of magic their essence is such that the residue of a spell will identify at least the relation of the caster to that on which it was cast. There’s a—I suppose you might think of it as a color. A particular hue specific, for example, to spells cast by those in positions of authority, or those cast on children by their parents, or by brothers on their brothers. The spell which binds you has the color characteristic of a spell cast on the self.”

The world and all sound and motion and light in it seemed to stop.

Then his pulse was flooding his ears. It was pounding a rhythm so thick he thought he was shaking from it and the rhythm said _cast_ _on the self cast on the self_ and the rhythm said _I want to die I want to die_ and the rhythm said _a blade or a rope or a bottle of pills_ …

“Wait, what?” Josh said. “Why would Quentin bind _himself_ to the Underworld? That makes no sense.”

“So what,” Quentin said, speaking too loudly to drown out his heartbeat and the silence in which the question might echo. He could not look at any of the others but he could almost see them nonetheless piecing it together: Julia immediately, Eliot a moment after, Margo perhaps from watching the horror on their faces… “So I, I, go bribe a dragon and find my other half?”

“There’s got to be something enticing in the armory,” Eliot said. He sounded like he had been hit in the stomach. Quentin couldn’t look at him. It hurt even to picture his face. 

The healer shook their head. “Where you were is not the Underworld,” they said. “It is the first part of what lies beyond. Even the fairies know little about it. It cannot be reached with these bodies, or through this realm.”

“So, so,” Quentin tried, “so what do, what do I, is there—” His face burned with shame and his breath was shaking and his ears were still ringing _cast on the self cast on the self_ and he could not look at the others and he wanted—

—well. To die.

What had he done?

“The way for those still living to access the place with no name,” the healer said, “is through the world of dreams. Transit can be long, and time does not pass there as it does in the physical realm. There is a risk to leaving the body unconscious.”

“What risk?” asked Julia.

“That the self will not return to the body in time,” the healer said. “While we cannot guarantee safe passage, there is an elixir we can brew which will point you toward the border once you sleep.”

“Yes please.” Margo’s voice.

The healer nodded at the assistants, who began to assemble ingredients. “And there is a spell to expedite the journey that can be performed quite easily by a Traveler, if you know one.”

“We know one,” Julia said. “And he owes me a favor.”

“My apprentice can meet you at Castle Whitespire,” said the healer, “and teach him the spell.”

“How will he know,” Julia said, “when he reaches it?” Some unreachable part of Quentin knew to be grateful to her for asking the questions he could not ask because he could not think because he could not stop hearing his heart drumming in his ears so loud he thought he might never hear the world again.

What the fuck had he done?

“The place with no name,” the healer said, “accessed through the realm of dreams, will make itself perceptible using the imagery of dreams. Unfortunately this means there is no one presentation. You may see the mouth of a cave, or a long staircase, or—”

“A river,” Quentin said. His mouth was dry.

The healer met his eyes. “So you’ve seen it.”

Quentin nodded mutely. He could feel the others looking at him but he couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t look at them. He couldn’t look at Eliot maybe ever again.

“So I fall asleep and I go to the river,” he said, trying in vain to sound in control, “and I, I find this other part of me, and I convince him to undo the spell.”

“That is the task before you,” said the healer. “And remember this: what transpires in this place will follow the logic of dreams. This can be advantageous, but it presents dangers, too. Heed your instincts. Although it is not impossible to return having failed in what you set out to do, it is improbable. In all likelihood, this will be your only chance.”

The words flowed past him like spilled water. He knew that he should listen but he felt already like he was moving in a dream: sound and vision did not connect, one moment refused to cohere with the next. It seemed impossible that he was standing in this clearing still after having learned what he had learned or that there were other people in the world. Nothing felt real except the sick shock which was already fading and the truth which sat like a stone on his chest: that he had struggled to come back to life not because death had once claimed him but because in the final moment it was he who had chosen death.

He should have fucking known.

*

Time seemed afterwards to filter into his awareness haphazardly. They were in the clearing, waiting, and there was a steady stream of voices asking questions he could not parse and did not answer; they were back in the carriage and someone was trying to talk to him but he couldn’t look at them and the _clop-clop-clop-clop_ of the horses’ feet beat out _cast on the self cast on the self_ ; they were back at the castle and the sky had turned the soft periwinkle of twilight and it startled him that such a color could exist in the world; he was on a bed in a room having mumbled some incomplete excuse and nearly run up the stairs grateful that no one had followed him. He could not stop thinking about what he had done or how stupid he had been ever to believe otherwise or how impossible it seemed to rewrite his own ending now that he knew how definitively he had penned it the first time.

He couldn’t believe he had ever thought it might end otherwise.

By the time someone knocked softly on the door it was night. He was lying on his back eyes open in the dark like if he stared long enough into the unseeable he might glimpse the answer hidden in those last missing days or else some revelation might emerge that would make the present tolerable. When Julia let herself in he noticed first the plane of lantern light edging across the ceiling. He knew that he ought to sit up to greet her but he could not make himself do it as he had failed to make himself do so many things including as it turned out the one thing he had sworn to keep doing no matter what.

“Penny’s all set with the fairy spell,” Julia said. “So whenever you’re ready.”

“Ready,” Quentin repeated, the word curling bitterly in his mouth. Then he felt bad and used the guilt to force himself upright. “Sorry. Thanks. I’m a little tense.”

“Yeah,” Julia said. She came around to the bed and set the lantern on the table beside it and then sat in the bed with him, legs crossed, shoulder to shoulder, like at some sleepover where she was about to light a flashlight under her chin to tell the scariest story she had learned at camp. Quentin wanted to say something but he could not decide whether he needed to tell her thank you or goodbye, which it struck him was the same dilemma that had kept him wrestling with the last note he had almost sent her long enough for him to delete the draft and take himself to Midtown Mental Health.

“I know this feels awful right now,” Julia said. “I can’t imagine how awful it feels. But there is a silver lining here. The fact that you—did this—means you can undo it.”

“Sure,” Quentin said, “yeah, all I have to do is summon up the will to live, so, you know. Good thing that’s never been problematic for me.” When she didn’t respond he said, “Sorry, I know it’s not considered socially acceptable to joke about your own suicidal tendencies.” Julia still said nothing and he finally chanced a look at her. He was startled to realize she was crying. “Jules, what—”

“Sorry,” she said, waving away his concern, “I’m sorry, you’re going through this and I’m the last thing you should be worried about, it’s fine—”

“No, Jules,” he said, “honestly, look, if it makes you feel better I’d rather worry about you than myself right now.” She laughed a little through her tears so he added, “It’d be a nice change of pace.”

“I just—” Julia shook her head and wiped her eyes. “I just feel like this is my fault, you know?”

He stared at her. “What? Why on earth—”

“Because I _know_ you,” she said, “and I knew you weren’t okay, but I was so caught up in my own shit. And I just feel like, if I’d said something—”

“You did, remember?” he said. “When my dad died, you—and I said it was, you know, _fine_ ,” the word like salt on his tongue, “and I didn’t need to talk about it, and I didn't need you to come with me, and I didn't—need anything."

“I should have pushed harder,” she insisted. “If I had, maybe then—”

“Then what?” he said. “Then I could deny, and dig in, and pick a huge fucking fight about it instead of dealing with my shit? Come on, Jules,” and he pushed a little into her side, “as much as we both might want it to be different, you and I know exactly how that conversation would have gone.”

Julia didn’t look satisfied but she didn’t argue. She couldn’t argue, Quentin knew; the weight of the truth bore too strongly on their history. After a moment she rested her head on his shoulder, a comforting pressure.

“Why do you do that?” she said wonderingly. “It’s _me_ , Q. You know I’m never judging.”

“Because I’m…” He searched for a word that would justify or at least explain it. At last he sighed: “Fucked up.” They stayed for several minutes in the soft glow of the lantern, his thoughts turning inward to all the things their friendship had carried and all the things he had always refused to let it make room for. “I always had that line,” he said, “Fillory saved my life. But Fillory was never just Fillory to me. It was—cardboard swords, and our map, and making diadems out of plastic beads, and that binder we filled up with illustrations. It was us. That’s what they took me back to—being a kid, with you. And when I think about—” He took a deep breath, trying to steady himself. “When I think about getting out of the hospital, and knowing I’d have to go back to school on Monday, and just being so sure”—he could not keep his voice from cracking—“that everyone would _know_ , somehow, like they could _see_ it on me—and I try to imagine walking into that building without knowing that you’d be waiting for me at my locker like always…” He shook his head. “Fillory didn’t save my life. You did. And—and I never thanked you, or even just— _appreciated_ that I had someone like that in my life—I was too busy projecting my hormones all over you, or resenting you for not slotting into some bullshit narrative that would somehow fix my whole life, or being a dick when you tried to help—”

“Q,” Julia said, straightening up, “ _stop_.” She shifted her body to sit facing him. “You are talking about shit that happened _years_ ago, some of it when we were _kids_. You have to start letting things go.”

“But it’s not about that,” Quentin said. “It’s not about this one time, or this one thing, it’s about—that’s who I am. That’s what I _do_. I fuck things up. I fuck things up, and I break things, and I ruin them, and now it turns out I fucked up the biggest possible thing, and I’m supposed to—unfuck it, somehow, and—Jules, I don’t know if I can do this.”

“Listen to me, Q,” she said. “Everyone fucks up, okay? _Everyone_. If I were made up of just the worst things I ever did, I’d be a monster. But people are more than that. Who you are is about what you do after. What you learn, and how you try to fix it and make things better. And I’ve never met anyone who tries harder to make things better than you.”

He was clenching his jaw to keep from crying. In the silence while he worked to get himself under control her words swam in the air and dissolved like raindrops on contact. “I feel like,” he said, “my whole life, I’ve been fighting this _thing_ inside me. And it won. I don’t know how I’m supposed to keep fighting after that.”

Julia shifted back to sit next to him and took his hand. For a long moment the only sound was their breathing and Quentin thought about how much of his life he had spent in the space next to Julia and how awful it felt to consider that this might be the last time not because he wanted to leave but because he did not trust himself to stay.

“But you have been fighting,” Julia said, slowly, like she was considering the words. “You didn’t have to come with me to the city, or start doing magic again, or tell Eliot how you felt, or any of that. Even now, you don’t have to do this. You could do like the fairy said, and go back to Brakebills or set up wards here and just live with half of you missing. But you’re not. Why do you think that is?”

It seemed humiliatingly optimistic even in his head to put words to whatever it was keeping him from succumbing to the half-existence a part of him was convinced was the best he could hope for. “I don’t know.”

“Why did you take yourself to the hospital?” she pressed.

He huffed a breath which was not quite a laugh. “Because I wanted to die.”

“No,” said Julia. “I mean, you did. But you made it to the hospital because you wanted to live. So, even if there was a moment—a seriously fucked up moment after months of seriously fucked up moments—where you wanted—the other thing—more… that doesn’t count _more_ than everything else. And what you said, about me saving your life—maybe I did. God knows you’ve saved mine. But you saved your life too. Remember what Margo said in the carriage?”

“The thing about the bonsai tree?” he said.

“She said there was something that wants to grow.” Julia squeezed his hand. “That’s you, too.”

Quentin had nothing to say to that. He leaned his head against her and wished that he could stay like that for hours, without moving or speaking, as if by doing so they could somehow arrest the passage of time.

He was so fucking tired.

“I guess I should do this,” he said. He reached for the table where he had set the small blue glass vial containing what the fairies had brewed for him. It was unexpectedly heavy in his hand and the glass was inscribed with minuscule ornate markings he could not decipher. “It feels like I should say good-bye, just in case.”

“Well, I’m not saying it,” Julia said. “I’m going be right here when— _not_ if—you wake up.”

“Thank you, Jules,” he said, meaning for her faith and her friendship and her strength and her care and every time she had ever made him laugh…. “It’s supposed to take about twenty minutes, so you can go tell Penny he’s up soon.”

“I can wait with you,” she said. “Until you fall asleep.”

“You don’t have to do that,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “But if you want company—”

He took a deep breath, trying to look prepared. “I think I should probably be alone for this.” It seemed right and natural that he should face on his own the effects of his self-destruction. “My mess, my clean-up, right?”

Julia pursed her lips briefly but only said, “Okay.” She reached her arms around him and in the familiarity of her embrace he had to fight to keep from collapsing into tears. Then she had closed the door and was gone.

In her absence the room felt inhospitably large. The edges of the lantern light tugged at his old habit of seeing everywhere accusatory and hopelessly mixed metaphors for his foibles: the weakness of the light and its inability to understand its own incompleteness and the dark corners with their secret dimensions like icebergs waiting to overtake the dying flame… In his hand the little blue vial shone at strange angles, glints of purple and crimson and the occasional streak of green shining through as he turned the fairy glass over and over. He thought about what Julia had said: that he could still put it back. He could evade the fight he had already lost and would almost certainly lose again if not now then in the future. He could walk downstairs and say that he had abandoned the risk and be restored to a version of himself which would not know how to laugh or cast or love but would be capable of surviving itself.

_You didn’t want to leave all this, did you?_

He didn’t want to. But he could picture it. He could imagine being something less than fully human, confined harmlessly to a circumscribed existence, securely cut off from the flow of life. The alternative he was meant to fight for—years of living, really living, wanting and trying and hoping and keeping himself somehow intact, living as a person among other people, as someone with a future—he couldn’t picture that.

He had never really been able to picture that.

Footsteps pounding up the stairs, rapid and loud; the door swung open—

“Eliot,” Quentin said, staring in shock. “What—”

“Look I know Julia told us you wanted to be alone,” he said. “But you know me. Always wanted to barrel dramatically past someone up a stone staircase.” Behind the archness of his words he looked unmoored, breathing hard. Quentin didn’t know what to say or how to face him.

“On the one hand, I get it,” Eliot went on. He was holding himself carefully upright and his eyes were wild as if he were searching for something he knew he would not find. When he spoke his voice had the character of water overflowing restraints. “You want to deal with your own shit, which is—noble, or whatever. But then on the other hand, which is the bigger hand—like, much bigger—it’s more like on one pinky and then on the other nine fingers—on the other hand”—and here his chest collapsed and something cracked terribly across his face—“like, are you fucking kidding me?” His gaze bore into Quentin and he looked—Quentin had never, ever wanted to make Eliot look at him like that—

For one nauseous moment Quentin sat paralyzed in the bed while Eliot stood in the doorway looking sick with terror and Quentin was again a sixteen-year-old kid in a hospital room he was afraid he’d never leave, scared and ashamed and convinced in his marrow that he had ruined his dad’s life.

Then Eliot was closing the distance between them with long hurried steps and climbing into bed with him and pulling him close, close, close. Quentin sat immobile and stiff, still unable to speak, and waited for Eliot to let go. But Eliot kept holding him and kept holding him and suddenly Quentin realized that every muscle in his body was tense and in the next instant let out a breath that became a sob. Then he was reaching for Eliot, leaning into him, curling against him, and Eliot was pressing him tight, until they wound up lying down, burrowed against each other, Quentin’s face against Eliot’s chest, shoulders heaving as he cried, and Eliot’s chin nestled against the top of his head and his arms still holding on like he could keep Quentin safe if only he never let go.

“Fuck,” Quentin managed, trying to pull together words, “El—”

“I’ve got you,” Eliot said, and said it again and again—“I’ve got you, Q”—like a spell or a prayer or a lullaby, until the rush of feeling that had burst out of him had somewhat calmed.

He lay there breathing in the heat and smell of Eliot thinking that whatever road he chose he might never have this again: Eliot’s heartbeat under his ear and his palm spreading slow circles of warmth on his back, Eliot’s body a harbor in which Quentin belonged. The voice he loved and the face he loved in all its minute complications and his beautiful hands and the private miracle of his own heart buoyant and full. The simple bliss of _two-ness_ he had only just learned to let be. 

“I’m scared, El,” he whispered, as though speaking it out loud would doom him to his fears. “I’m so fucking scared. And I don’t know what to do. Because if I go into—into this other realm, and find the rest of me—I don’t know if I come back from that. I feel like—if I did that—if I did the thing I’ve spent my whole life trying not to do—whatever made me do it, I don’t know if I’m strong enough to beat it.”

“But if you’re scared,” Eliot said, “isn’t that a good sign? Because it means you don’t want—to stay there.”

“El,” Quentin said, and lifted himself to look into Eliot’s worried face. “Of course I don’t want to—I mean I don’t want to die, and I don’t want to be someone who killed himself, and I don’t want to leave you, or anyone, but especially not you, again, after I already…. But however it happened, whatever I was thinking at the time, I couldn’t have—I know I didn’t want that then, either. And that wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to keep me here.” He was starting to cry again. “So a part of me thinks I should just—get some fairy spells and set up some wards and just—live like that. Wake up and go to sleep and, I don’t know, eventually maybe remember enough to do something in between. And I’m still leaving, but at least there’s something there, and maybe… maybe I can, or you can…”

Eliot pushed a strand of hair out of Quentin’s face and lingered by his ear. “Is that what you want?”

“Of course not,” said Quentin.

“What do you want?” Eliot said gently.

“God,” Quentin said, “I want—I want to go and kick my own ass for fucking up so bad and then I want to come back and, I don’t know, live my life. Be with you, and with Julia, and everyone. Be okay, or okay-ish, at least. But then I think, you know, I’ve spent twenty-six years trying and failing to figure out how to do that, how to just be a person who is kind of okay, and maybe it’s time to call it. Maybe I should just accept that I—I can’t be like other people are, I can’t do that, and I should just… take what I can get.”

Eliot’s mouth twisted slightly. He lifted his head to kiss Quentin’s forehead, then guided Quentin to nestle back against him, softly stroking his hair. “I never did give you one of my speeches,” he said.

“I mean, I feel like you communicated the relevant information,” Quentin said. Even through everything, the rhythm of Eliot’s fingers through his hair felt soothing.

“I wanted to,” Eliot continued as though he hadn’t spoken. “I thought about it, even that first night. Because I did want to explain why I didn’t—I wanted to make you understand, that when I said what I said, it had nothing to do with you, or even with us, really. It was all about my own shit. But it turns out it’s pretty much impossible to explain my own shit without getting into the, you know, psych 101 style traumatic childhood rundown. Not exactly my favorite topic. And I figured—okay, I made the big statement and I did the big commitment and I dropped the fucking l-word, that’s enough emotional milestones for one day. I can save the excavation of my issues with intimacy for, like, our six-month anniversary, or something. I thought I’d have—time.”

“El,” Quentin said, “you don’t have to—”

Eliot stilled his hand against the back of his neck. “I want to,” he said. “I want to say it, and I want you to hear it, before—whatever happens next. But just, um—be a little patient, because I’m kind of new to this.”

“Of course,” Quentin said. He shifted to lie next to Eliot, the two of them curving toward each other like flowers toward the light.

“It’s funny,” Eliot said, eyes fixed on a point somewhere above Quentin. “I figured out pretty precociously that my family were the worst people in the world, and my job was to grow up to be the opposite of them. So it’s not like I grew up believing all the bullshit they said about who I was or what I was, or what it meant that I—like, if you’d asked me, _hey, Eliot, are you worried your shithead father’s right about the hellfire and damnation thing?_ I would have, you know, laughed and quoted Oscar Wilde and acted like the whole concept was a big joke. But.” His mouth tensed like he was working to keep control. Quentin loved him so fully he thought he could almost feel it in his body as a biological process like breathing or the pulse of his blood. “It turns out maybe I didn’t need to agree that I was—whatever they said I was—disgusting, or—whatever else—I guess that formative years shit has a way of burrowing in, and you can’t even see it until… Because I said over and over, whatever, fuck off, I want what I want and I love who I love, but when I really thought about it, about me, in love… it was always some tawdry affair, or something entertainingly dysfunctional, or a big dramatic trainwreck. Something arch and ironic, or something that would make a good story later over cocktails. Like love was a bit. Or a joke. Like it would be so hideously embarrassing to just want—a boyfriend.” For a second Eliot looked impossibly young and Quentin reached to intertwine their fingers and bring their hands to rest between them. Eliot gave him a small, sad smile.

“That’s why I took the Mike thing so hard,” he went on. “Well. And all the—demonic possession and violence, and it was the second time I’d used magic to solve a problem with murder, and that year I was already kind of—I mean there’s a lot to unpack there, which I’ve really only started to… Anyway. I felt so fucking _stupid_. For thinking that this nice, normal guy would be into me. Like the universe had pulled a practical joke, and now it was laughing at me for being dumb enough to fall for it.”

Eliot set his hand against Quentin’s cheek. “And then you came along. And you were so… _good_. And you said what you said, and Q, I know you. I knew it was real. I knew you wouldn’t say it if it didn’t matter. I knew.” He bit his lip. “But I couldn’t—process it, or believe in it, because—because of me. Because someone like you loving someone like me was so far from anything I’d ever imagined about how my life could go. So far that even with fifty years of memories lighting up my synapses, even with you going out on a limb to say it to my face, I still couldn’t get it to make sense.”

“El,” Quentin breathed. A swell of tenderness surged in him so sweet and aching it was beyond what he would have believed himself still capable of feeling.

He stroked his thumb softly along Quentin’s face. “You are facing an unbelievably shitty decision. And I can’t make it for you. But I threw away the best thing that ever happened to me because I was so convinced it was impossible I couldn’t believe it even when I was watching it happen. I don’t want you to make the same mistake.”

Quentin kissed him, then, and Eliot kissed him back, deep and slow, with no sense of urgency. Like they had all the time in the world. He lay with his head on Eliot’s chest and let himself feel for a minute safe in the closeness of Eliot’s body. Eliot toyed with the hair at the nape of his neck and Quentin thought about how hard everything had always felt and how easily they fit together. How far his life was from what he had always assumed it would be. He thought about being sixteen and newly informed that his brain had an illness that might always be there and terrified that that meant this would be from now on as good as it got—bare walls and the sterile smell of industrial cleanliness and a room where nothing could happen to him for better or worse. He had been so afraid that he would spend his life like that: locked up for protection against his own inability to move through the human world.

“You know what’s crazy?” he said. “We’ve faced down gods and monsters, all kinds of fucked up shit, and none of it has scared me like this. Because I’ve never—I’ve never been afraid of anything more than my own brain. But—” He was realizing the truth even as he spoke the words. “I’ve spent so long afraid that I would kill myself, and it was never—I mean, it was about that. But what really scared me about it was the idea that I might just—give up, one day. And I guess I did. And if I go—beyond, wherever that is—maybe I fight and I lose, or maybe I give up again. But I think…” He sat up. “I think I have to try. Because if I don’t, then—that’s not making a different choice, that’s just… moving the timeline, on giving up. I don’t know if that’s brave or stupid, but I think—I think it’s what I have to do.”

Eliot sat up, too. “I’m not a thousand percent convinced the line between brave and stupid is as clean as we want it to be,” he said, “but for what it’s worth, I think this is brave.” He leaned forward to kiss Quentin’s forehead. “Before you go, you should know that what we’ve had together is already so much more than I ever thought I was going to get. But—” He smiled a little. “I’m selfish. I want more.”

Quentin was amazed to find himself smiling back. “You can be as selfish with me as you want.”

“I _will_ be taking you up on that,” Eliot said, with a hint of one of his fond smirks.

Quentin reached for where he had dropped the fairy bottle on the bed beside him and held it up once more. “I guess it’s time.”

“If you look me in the eye,” Eliot said, “and tell me you want to be alone, I’ll go. But—”

Quentin shook his head. “No. I want—I want you to stay. Please.” Eliot wrapped an arm around his shoulders and Quentin thought, _if I can just remember exactly what that feels like, maybe_ — “Well, here goes double or nothing.” He unstoppered the vial and drank the liquid down. “Huh. I was expecting something with more of a kick to it, but it tastes weirdly like grape soda. Oh, and it—acts fast,” he added, feeling wooziness set in. “Like if you took a whole bottle of melatonin.”

Eliot helped him lie down, arranging it so that Quentin’s back was nestled against his front, with his arms around Quentin’s waist, pulling him close. “I love you,” Quentin said, the words coming out thick and clumsy.

“I love you too,” Eliot said somewhere behind his ear.

His eyes were starting to close and his limbs were growing heavy but a thought occurred to him before he drifted off. “Did you really have to barrel dramatically past Julia?”

“I’ll have you know I was prepared to,” said Eliot. “But no, obviously not. She practically threw me up the stairs.”

Quentin smiled or maybe just thought about smiling. “Tell her I said thanks, will you?”

And the last thing he heard before the world went dark was, “Tell her yourself, when you wake up.”

*

In the dream he was in his Brakebills dorm, not his room in the Physical Cottage but the one he’d shared with Penny in the new students’ building. Plain shelves of personal possessions, featureless walls, stacks on the floor of textbooks opened to the last page he’d been studying. He peered at the one closest to his foot: his herbalism textbook, describing basic principles of moss-based ointments, next to a spiral notebook outlining the key points in his own messy handwriting. It was the room in which he had put up wards and conjugated Greek verbs and practiced minor energetic transfers and believed his life was beginning. He usually thought of the weeks he had spent here as a rare respite, a time after his interior crises and before his life had begun to explode in newly literal ways, but sitting here on the unmade twin bed he realized that when he bothered to really remember this period he could only recall ever feeling anxious and afraid.

“Well, this is… is there a word for the opposite of nostalgia?”

Penny was standing in the doorway. There was something uncanny about seeing this Penny in this room, the shock of familiarity overlaid with the subtle and undeniable distinctions that marked this Penny as other than the one Quentin had known. The way he carried what he had seen in his face and his voice and the angle of his shoulders.

He stepped inside and walked slowly along the walls, taking in the setting. Quentin wondered what he was remembering, if there was any overlap in their memories. Penny stopped in front of him and held out a hand. “Ready to go?”

“As I’ll ever be,” Quentin said, but he didn’t move. “Can I ask you something?”

Penny shrugged. “Sure.”

“In your timeline, in your world…” Quentin hesitated, trying not to sound insensitive. “I mean you lost—everything. You watched shit fall apart on a scale I can’t even imagine, and I’ve seen some fucked up shit. Everything you knew, everyone you cared about…”

“Thanks for the recap,” Penny said, “but is there a question in here?”

“Sorry, I just—how did you keep going?” said Quentin. “After all that, in this, like, post-apocalyptic nightmare universe, with no one else, no idea you were going to jump into a fucking alternate reality, why didn’t you just…”

“Kill myself?” Penny said, then twisted his mouth regretfully. “Sorry.”

“No, it’s fine,” Quentin said. In fact he appreciated in this instance Penny’s lack of interest in tact. “And—yeah, kind of. Pretty much.”

Penny took a long time to answer. Quentin wondered if he’d set himself up for some jab: _Step one, don’t be a pussy_. But finally he said, “I don’t know.” He sat next to Quentin on the bed. “I thought about it. Sometime around day 20 of having officially nothing left to live for. But I didn’t like, draw up a pros and cons list. I don’t know why I didn’t.” He looked at Quentin. “Sorry. That’s probably not helpful.”

Quentin shrugged. “It was a weird question. Thanks for being honest, at least.” 

“Yeah.”

Once he had sat in this room and hoped—what had he hoped? It had felt so new but now it seemed the same hope he had always nurtured: that he would wake up a different person. That it was still possible to suddenly cease being himself. And now he was here to attempt to keep being himself. He wasn’t sure he knew how to hope for that.

He did hope this room wasn’t the last thing he saw in life. Maybe that counted for something.

“Alright,” Quentin said. “I’m doing this.” I’m trying, at least, he thought, and grasped Penny’s hand.


	6. Chapter 6

The river raged, twisting and glinting in the moonlight like some monstrous writhing serpent of the depths. Thunder rolled almost without ceasing over the constant clatter of the rain which fell so cold and thick in seconds Quentin was soaked and shivering. The ropes of the wooden bridge swung dangerously in wind strong enough that he had to brace himself against its pull and even so his feet stood unsteady on the squelching mud beneath. He forced himself to look past the storm and the dirt and to the other side with its dark figure, which held what it was he needed. This time when the lightning flashed illuminating the creature’s face he saw what he had known he would see: his own self, jaw stubbornly set, ready to guard his deathly claim. It struck him in the moment of sight that on some level he must always have known.

There was after all no one he hated more.

Quentin gritted his teeth and made his way to the river’s edge. “Okay, it’s over,” he shouted over the noise of the storm. “You’ve had your little tantrum, and you’ve really fucked shit up, but it’s time. I’m here to—to get it, whatever it is, and go back to the actual world, so just—just undo the spell.”

The other Quentin crossed his arms. “No.”

“What do you mean, _no_?” Quentin said, exasperated. “Come on, we have to—we have to get back, we don’t have forever. Just—I’m not giving up this time, and I’m not done fighting, so—let’s go. Do it.”

“Why?”

“Why what?” Quentin said. “Why _live_?”

“Yeah, that. Why live?” The other Quentin smirked a little, as though he knew—which of course he did—that there was no answer to this question to which Quentin had ever been able to hold on. “What’s the fucking point?”

“The point is—” He ran his hand through his hair in frustration. “The point is I have to, because that’s what people _do_ , okay? Not—you have to keep going, you can’t just throw in the towel because things are fucked up. That’s not how it works.”

“But I did.” The version of him on the other side of the river narrowed his eyes. “ _You_ did.”

“Yeah, well—that was a mistake,” said Quentin. “And I’m here to take it back.”

“You don’t really believe that,” the other Quentin said. “You know that’s what you’re supposed to think. But that’s not how you feel, deep down inside.”

“Yes, I do,” Quentin insisted even as his heart was starting to pound. “I—of course it was a mistake to just—leave everyone like that. Eliot and Julia and—I’m not gonna do that to them again. I’m not going to walk out after everything they’ve done for me.”

His other half scoffed. “For you? Please. They did it because they felt guilty, because they’re decent people who are never gonna turn down the big noble move.”

“Well, maybe,” said Quentin, “but so, so why would I want to leave people like that? Why—”

“Why would you want to stick around,” countered the other, “weighing them down? Can you imagine what kind of things they’d be able to pull off if they could just stop worrying about your sorry ass? I mean, Julia? Alice? These are once-in-a-generation magical talents and they’re stuck baby-sitting some loser who can’t get his shit together?”

“No,” Quentin said, but he could hear his own voice hollowing out. How many times had he thought the same thing, how many alternate lives had he imagined in which his friends were free of their sense of obligation…. “No, stop, you’re—you’re not even real, you don’t get a say here, you’re just—you’re just my illness, you’re just this thing my brain does, it’s, it’s physiological, okay, neurons and chemicals and, and not enough serotonin, and—a couple glitches in the wiring don’t get to decide the fate of my fucking life, asshole. That’s not—you’re not who I am.”

“Oh come the _fuck on_ ,” the other Quentin spat, his smug disdain thinning to reveal the beginnings of real anger. “You’re not seriously still clinging to that, are you? We both know that’s a nice fucking story to tell your parents or your teachers or your friends to explain why you can’t just be a fucking adult already, and maybe for some people out there it’s actually true, but a couple of misplaced molecules are not the problem here. _You’re_ the problem. You’ve always _been_ the problem. And eventually everyone else is going to get sick of the excuses and figure you out, and then there’ll be no one left to miss you when you die. Just like your father.”

“Stop,” Quentin said, covering his ears.

“You’ll die alone,” his dark counterpart went on, “like dad, and just like him, it’ll be your fault when it happens. So why not skip all the fucking misery and just go out while people still give a shit?”

“No,” Quentin said. The rain stung his face as he shook his head again and again. “No, no, I’m going to live. I’m going to live this time, and I’m—I’m not alone, I’m not going to be alone.” He tried desperately to conjure proofs of this but they seemed as insubstantial as a fading dream.

“You’re already alone,” his other self said. “Even when you manage to get someone on your side, you fuck it up because you’re too busy wallowing in your own bullshit to actually care about anyone else.”

“That’s not true,” Quentin said, “I care—are you kidding, of course I fucking care—”

“Like you cared about Alice?” said the doppleganger. “Like you cared about her enough to fuck her life? Like you care about Julia? She’s stuck around for almost twenty years and you’re _still_ waiting for the day she wises up enough to leave. You’re _never_ going to trust her. And don’t even get me started on _Eliot_.”

“No,” Quentin said weakly, “no.” There was a clap of thunder and a gust of wind that nearly knocked him sideways. He was grasping for arguments in his defense but his resolve was faltering.

“Face it,” said the other Quentin. “There’s nothing you can say to convince me to go back out there, because the truth is, you know I’m right. You know there’s no point to signing up for who knows how many more years of fucking up and screwing people over and feeling like shit all the goddamn time. And you know it _hurts_. It will never stop fucking hurting. The only safe thing to do is stay here.”

The worst part was that in him surged a horrible temptation to believe it. The lie that had been calling him at varying pitch for so long and which must have seduced him at last… Quentin clenched his fists at his sides. His fingertips were aching with cold. He had come here to fight and if he could not win with words neither would he let himself be taken down by them.

He studied the bridge, jittering wildly in the storm. _Dream logic_ , he remembered, and grabbed the ropes and began to cross.

“What exactly is your plan, here?” the other Quentin said.

“If you won’t give it to me,” he said, balancing on a board, “then I’m coming over to take it. And I’ll make you undo the spell, by force if I fucking have to. I’m not giving up this time.” The bridge swayed precipitously and a bolt of lightning struck alarmingly close to where he stood but he clung to the ropes and made his way step by step through the dark wet night until he had reached the opposite bank. It occurred to him only as he set food on solid ground that perhaps there was a risk he had not weighed in voluntarily coming to this side.

He stood now face to face with his mirror twin who looked infuriatingly certain, one eyebrow raised as if to say _I’m waiting_. Quentin hated him: the part of himself that had over and over turned away from life, that had insisted on breaking the little he managed to secure, that refused hope or light or personhood. Some twisted thrill sparked beneath his gut at the thought that perhaps he had been called here to defeat this miserable wraith at his core at last.

He put his hands up in position to initiate battle magic. “I’m doing this,” he warned; the other didn’t react. And so Quentin drew up everything he had stolen from him—every failure and fuck-up and mistake unlearned from—every promise unspoken because he couldn’t trust himself and every chance he had turned his back on to begin to lead a better life—every hospitalization and half-written note, every blown deadline and failed connection, each scar and humiliation and regret—and he cast.

Dirt splayed in all directions; the wind howled bent by the force of the blast. The bridge creaked, its attachment to land slipping; somewhere thunder rolled. But when his sight cleared, his dark reflection stood unbothered and indifferent.

“Yeah, that kind of shit doesn’t do anything anymore,” he said. “Kind of a superpower.”

“God, you _idiot_ ,” Quentin fumed, stupidly angry at the spell’s failure. “We _have_ superpowers, they’re called _magic_.”

The other Quentin scoffed. “Magic isn’t worth much after what I’ve seen.”

“Get over yourself,” Quentin said. “We’ve seen the same shit, asshole!”

The jarringly familiar eyes narrowed. “Yeah, but I actually remember all of it.”

This stopped Quentin. An unsettling jolt ran all the way down his body. “You—what do you mean, you—”

And the other Quentin stepped forward and placed his palm against Quentin’s chest and he—

“No,” he whispered.

— _remembered_ —

“No, stop,” he pleaded, unable to care about the note of panic creeping into his voice, but it was too late because already he was remembering—

—his father. His father had died alone and unmourned and Quentin could not stop reviewing in his mind the facts that his father had known Quentin intended to do something which might kill him and would have discerned that Quentin had succeeded and must have concluded lying in a hospital bed as he watched his body descend into pain and organ failure that Quentin either had lied about trying to help him or himself had already died and wouldn’t it have seemed preferable to a father dying waiting for a son that never came to believe in the end that only death and not indifference had kept Quentin from his side and wouldn’t it have been preferable a voice had started to say if in fact Quentin had died rather than make the choice which had led to this and wouldn’t it have been preferable if his story had ended already certainly to those around him and perhaps the voice whispered in his hours most alone even to himself—

“I don’t want it,” he said, “take it back—”

—and so in had crept the old familiar song during nights he spent lying in bed at the penthouse exhausted but too panicked to sleep waiting for the monster’s next brutality or waiting for the next unveiling of his failure to do right or waiting maybe sometimes with something less than dread for the monster kill him at last—

“Stop—”

—and so too had begun the old movies in his head, scene after scene on a loop of his own expiration, weeks spent barely able to stave them off during the day and helpless to do anything at night except watch and try perhaps at least to imagine that when he died as it seemed more and more inevitable that he would he might manage to do so in a useful way and so sometimes the scene looked almost heroic which he appreciated with a rush of shame for the lie he knew he was enjoying telling himself and sometimes the scene looked almost like going to sleep and he so badly wanted to sleep and it had been so long since he had really slept—

“This isn’t—this isn’t right, that’s not—”

—and nothing helped not magic not talking not silence not cigarettes nothing eased the weight against the backs of his eyes of his body cold and void of breath but between him and the darkness was a golden thread marked _save Eliot_ and he could stand and walk and speak and make plans and investigate and eat and do anything at all except collapse and wait for the end because he had a job and the job was _save Eliot_ and on the other side of _save Eliot_ perhaps he would somehow again live in a world that had things like light and sleep and on occasion any kind of pleasure or joy although he had begun to doubt that he would ever regenerate his own capacity for such things and he had begun to look at himself in mirrors and think that he was seeing a ghost or a corpse or some other unreal unperson and he had begun to wonder if in some way he had already begun to inhabit the world of the dead but those were concerns he could attend to after _save Eliot_ and then—

“No, no, no, no—”

—and then—

—and then he had saved Eliot and nothing changed and nothing shifted and nothing eased and he had moved still like a dead thing through a world to which he no longer held claim and he had felt nothing and nothing and the horrible abyss of nothing inside him where there should have been anything at all and he had known—

“Please—”

—he had known—

—he had known then that it was over. The monster had hollowed him out, carved him in his image a creature of need and stone, and there was nothing left in him to feel or love or be the person he had been who had already for months seemed an illusion. He had accomplished the miracle of Eliot alive and free and his heart sat in his body unmoved and he had stepped into the next phase of his mission knowing then that there was nothing anymore that would move it and thus no reason anymore for him to continue. If he had been too weak to hold on to himself in the face of the monster’s onslaught. If he was made now only of something cold and still as death itself. At the Seam he had hesitated because this was so clearly the ending of the story but it was not the ending he had come to believe in and there was no longer any story in which they won and he returned to keep living with what it had cost him to get there. Quentin Coldwater was gone already. And when Everett’s footsteps had crept upon them it struck him as the alignment finally of the destiny he had so long hoped for which he understood with a calm unhurried clarity was of course to die and in the moment before he cast—

“ _No_ —”

—in some hidden corner of himself he had felt an unmistakable relief—

He was on the ground. He was on his knees in the dirt and weeping, heaving with it, crying so hard his stomach twisted and he retched emptily, doubled over with his hands sinking into the mud as though the weight of the memories bore upon him gravitationally. He couldn’t stop crying and he couldn’t stop remembering and he couldn’t imagine ever again mustering the strength to rise to his feet and he couldn’t—he couldn’t…

The version of him who had unleashed this stood above him. “Do you get it now?” he said impatiently. “I’m not fucking playing around here. _That’s_ what life is. That’s what you’re so desperate to get back to. Every day you spend up there is a day you have to carry that shit around.”

Quentin had no reply to that. His other self looked to him now as he had seen himself in his final days: monstrous, inhuman. A broken and unfeeling thing. He was trapped, he realized—pinned between the certainty of his death if he stayed and his fear of the person he would be if he brought back with him this defective shadow, his lifelong tumor finally metastasized into something fatal and deforming… The rain beat at the exposed skin of his neck. How fucking stupid after everything to die like this, still and always at the mercy of something he had so long despised. His hands clenched fistfuls of dirt.

“Fuck you,” he said, voice hoarse.

“What?” said the other Quentin.

Quentin gritted his teeth and pushed himself upright. In his chest a live wire of rage was uncoiling so potent it felt like a drug but it was something beyond the despair that had flattened him and so he held it, let it fill him up, used it to make himself stand on shaking legs. “I said _fuck you_.” He spat at his feet.

The other Quentin rolled his eyes. “You’re so goddamn dramatic.”

Quentin lunged.

He started with a shove to the chest which at the point of contact sent a rush into his blood and he shoved again, harder, sending his other self reeling backwards. _Good_ , he thought. While the other Quentin was regaining his balance he attacked again, a proper hit this time, fist to the jaw with a satisfying sound; and then he was fighting blind and fast, punching his stomach, backhanding his face, driving a knee into his groin, and he was yelling, too, barely aware of the words coming out of his mouth. “You stole my _life_ , asshole,” he cried; “you fucking coward, you ruin _everything_ , every fucking thing—”

He hardly knew which one of them he wanted to hurt or what was more gratifying—the spurt of blood from the other’s nose or the sting of bone against his own knuckles. It felt right, it all felt right, the answer to some hunger Quentin hadn’t known he had, to hit him hard enough to wind him and hit him again to send him to his knees—“you fucking piece of _shit_ , _fight_ me”—and kick him in the face so that he collapsed backwards and then kick his ribs in again and again. It felt right to watch his body spasm in pain, feel the give of flesh against his foot, the dull noise of impact.

The other Quentin accepted this all with maddening calm. “Fight _back_ ,” Quentin insisted, incensed at this refusal, craving something harder and darker, something that would leave him bruised and bloodied. He got down on the ground, straddling the other’s torso to get up close, hiss in his face, “You wanna kill yourself so bad, fucking fight me back—” He circled his other self’s neck with his hands and began to press down and in. “Is this what you wanted,” he demanded, relishing the strained sounds of his enemy struggling to breathe, choking him harder, harder, “you sick fuck, why won’t you fucking fight back—” He leaned forward to peer into his face, expecting to see stifled rage or else infuriating confidence. But the other Quentin just looked dully resigned. Like he couldn’t imagine any reason to fight. Like he—

—like he thought he deserved it.

Quentin scrambled off the body as though he’d been burned.

He was shaking. His whole body was shaking, breath coming in shallow uneven gasps. He drew his knees to his chest. His hands were trembling and his fingers were cold and going numb, the skin purpling where he had touched—pushed—choked—

What the fuck was he doing?

The fight was leaving him and in its absence he felt hollowed out. He couldn’t stop shaking. He couldn’t stop remembering how easily it had come to him. How badly he had wanted to—

He didn’t know how long he sat there drenched and shaking and sick with his own violence. The river was beginning to seep into the plain. There was no moon or stars or any kind of light but even if there had been the world seemed not to exist outside of his pale hands, with what they had done. After what seemed like a long time the other Quentin came to sit beside him.

“It’s a matter of time now,” he said, gesturing. He sounded tired.

Quentin followed where he pointed. Lightning flashed and he saw it: the bridge was gone. Sometime during his frenzy the storm had beaten it loose and the river washed it away. He registered its loss distantly.

“You could still undo the spell,” he said halfheartedly.

“Yeah,” his other self said. “But we both know that’s not going to happen.”

Quentin looked at his face. Blood gathered at his nose, a swollen and split upper lip, one eye going black-and-blue. His insides knotted with guilt. “I’m—sorry.” He still couldn’t believe what he had done and how close he had come to—doing more.

The other Quentin shrugged. “I would’ve done the same thing.”

There was a forced lightness in his tone barely covering some deep ache and for the first time since coming here Quentin studied him without the intent to convince or attack: the defeated hunch of his posture, the exhaustion in his eyes. The way he stared down at his fidgeting hands, as though he were afraid to glimpse accidentally the world beyond. How afraid he was—for all his bluster now that Quentin was really looking he could see the fear in every angle of his body. It was a fear he knew.

“This whole time,” he said slowly, thinking aloud, “I’ve been thinking you were this—this sickness conjoined to me, or this anchor bringing me down. You were, you were this enemy inside my body, my illness, something that—something that made it impossible for me to be me. But you’re not, are you. You’re me.”

“No shit,” his other self said, but his shoulders tensed.

“Which means…” Quentin shut his eyes, trying to grasp at something like coherence through the total mindfuck of sitting somewhere between sleep and death talking to half of himself. “When you wanted me dead, that means I wanted me dead. And I know I wanted you dead, because—” He flexed his stiff fingers. He could feel the edge of it still like something ghostly, the violence and the force and how he had wanted—yes: he had wanted to destroy himself. “I wanted—God, I wanted to fucking hurt you. Because you—you made me remember. What happened. Who I became. What I lost, what I—” In the absence of his fury the grief of it was rising again: his father, the monster, Eliot, his own battered heart… “If you wanted me to give up, why didn’t you just give me back those memories on day one? Why waste months waiting for the spell to—bring me back here?”

“Honestly?” The other twitched uncomfortably. “I didn’t think you’d hold out this long.”

Quentin had to laugh at that, short and bitter. It was such a recognizable sentiment. Then he laughed again, a little lighter this time, because— “But you were wrong, though.”

“What?”

“You were wrong,” he repeated. “I’m still fucking here. Which means _I_ was wrong, which means—”

“Nothing,” the other said, “you’re wrong about like fucking everything.”

“No, no, listen—” His mind was racing to draw the pieces together. “You were wrong that I’d give up. I didn’t give up. I came fucking close to it, sometimes, but I didn’t. And I thought I was coming here to fight the final battle in this fucking civil war my brain has been waging on itself for years, and that either I was going to beat you, once and for all, or you’d destroy me like you’ve been trying to my whole life. I was so sure those were the only two ways this could end. But that wasn’t right, either.” His heart had started to pound so heavily he wondered briefly if earlier it had stopped. “There must be a third option.”

The other Quentin raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Which would be…”

As long as he had been the way he was he had clung to the fight he put up against himself as his surest proof that he was more than his darkest impulses. Now Quentin took in his missing part, trying for the first time to see him as something other than a nemesis: his fear and his despair, his bottomless loathing and his weakness, the pain at his core and how nakedly he wore it, once Quentin bothered to look. How alone he was. How tired. How much and how long he had hurt. And then he knew. “I forgive you.”

His splintered self flinched like he’d been slapped. “What the fuck?”

“I forgive you,” Quentin said again, stronger this time, trying not to react to the stricken expression he could see gathering on his other half’s face. “For what you did. For—” He made himself say it. “For wanting to die. You were—hurt, and scared, and you wanted it to stop, and that doesn’t fix it, that doesn’t make it _okay_ , it’s _not_ okay, it’s—god, it’s seriously fucked up, and I thought—when I found out I thought, even if I made it through this, I could never live with myself again. But I forgive you, for being fucked up and making the wrong call.” He could see how badly this destabilized the rest of him and he could understand it, too. It was terrifying to step out of the anger that had so defined him. But he couldn’t live like that anymore. Which meant— “And you have to forgive me, too.”

His other half tried for a mocking laugh that came out closer to hysterical. “Oh, and why would I need to do that? If you’re the fucking good witch, I’m pathetic enough to feel sorry for but you’re so fucking _perfect_ , what am I forgiving you for, exactly?”

It was uncanny to hear the voice of his worst moments without being exactly the one to produce it. How often had he thought or said something in that exact tone of protective contempt and believed it in the moment to be his objective reality… “I always thought the same thing,” he said. “I’ve always, always thought, I hated myself for being this person who—couldn’t deal. Who shut down and avoided my shit and who was always fucking running no matter where I was because the thing I wanted to get away from was myself, and I thought that was the part of me I hated and it _was_ but—the whole time, there was this whole other layer I couldn’t even see, because—I hated you for wanting to give up, but you… you hate me for _not_ giving up. Don’t you.” He felt the truth of him pierce his chest as he said it: all the years he had spent trying and failing, wanting what he was convinced he would never have, stumbling forward into humiliations that never paid off… how the shame of his efforts had twisted around him like barbed wire.

“Yeah, well,” said the other Quentin, his casual tone belied by his eyes darting back and forth like someone who had been caught, “that’s not really an issue anymore, is it. Because when it came down to it—when I reminded you what life is really like—you made the same choice I did. And now we’re here. It’s over. I win.”

In the roar of thunder that followed Quentin considered heart sinking that it might be true that once again he had doomed himself. What caught in his throat was not the guilt or the defeat but the sorrow: that he would never again see the sun or his friends, that he would no more laugh or fuck or think or move, that there would be no more late nights or books or plans jointly hatched… And in mourning his own life he felt a shock almost like hope. “No,” he said.

“No?” the other echoed mockingly.

“No, come on, you don’t really believe that’s winning,” Quentin said. “And it’s not over. Because—look, maybe you’re right. Maybe life is pointless, and dangerous. And absolutely it hurts. It’s always going to fucking hurt. But now, right now, I know exactly how bad it hurts, and I know I just almost fucked it all up again, and I still— _want_ it. I want—anything, everything, I want all of it. I want to _live._ And I don’t know why. I don’t have a good reason. I just—do. I want—” He held up his hand and hesitated. _Dream logic_ , he remembered; then leaned in and pressed his hand gently against the other’s chest and gave him—

—fresh blackberries pizza eaten drunk a hot shower a sweater he didn’t hate the successful casting of a small and lightly stylish spell tacos poetry good coffee a long walk listening to his favorite songs—

—Alice’s talent and more than that her determination and Kady’s ferocity and the iron strength of Margo’s love and Josh’s eagerness to help and even Penny’s sense of duty and Julia’s brilliance and loyalty and the miracle of her having chosen him again and again and Eliot’s kindness and Eliot’s grace and Eliot’s courage—

—an afternoon with a good book and a night out with a friend and the hush of a weekend morning unhurried and well-rested with the day soft and untouched like fresh snow and the first beautiful day in a New York spring with everyone livelier and kinder and unburdened by their coats and everything feeling a little more possible if after winter the sun could yet come back—

—when Alice complimented him on his casting and the little smile she couldn’t suppress after making bending light look as easy as breathing and when a professor told him his essay was near graduate level work and when something made Margo flash that grin that made him remember she was really barely older than he was and when he kissed someone for the first time fully conscious of the cliché and on guard against perceiving it as somehow unique but succumbing still to how sharply it caught his body and transformed the color of his world and when Julia had led their team in demolishing the competition at bar trivia and when his dad took him ice skating to teach him how to stay upright before some classmate’s upcoming birthday party and when Eliot stirred in his sleep only to curl warm and content against his back and his breath against Quentin’s neck in the night was proof that he had been there and would be there come morning still because there was no where else he wanted to be—

—all the unknown corridors time might yet illuminate in the people he loved and all the uncollected moments they would one day share and how much he had still to learn about loving them well and every person he had not met but who might one day prove as welcome a surprise as anyone else he had been lucky enough to count among his kind—

—a day in eleventh grade when he got an A on an English paper and a B-plus on a math quiz and Casey Hawkins was absent and at lunch he and Julia made each other laugh speculating about whether their science teacher was a pothead and their last period history teacher had to go home with a fever and the sub put on a video so they spent the whole time passing notes and he finished his homework early and watched a _Law and Order_ rerun while eating leftovers with his dad and listened to the new Belle and Sebastian album while killing time online and only after he had gotten into bed did it occur to him that not once since waking had he thought of the hospital and relief blew over him like a breeze as he finally came to believe that he was still something other than sick—

Quentin watched his own face crack open like a meteorite hit: the huge and watery shock that nearly veered into collapse. “Fuck,” breathed his missing self, “ _fuck_ —all of that—the whole time—how could I forget—?”

“I don’t know,” Quentin said honestly. “We’re not—great at that. We let go of what we should hold on to, and vice versa… but I think I’m getting better. I think we _can_ get better. We can grow, and we can change, and we—we’ll probably always suck at some stuff, but it’s not going to stay the same. We can still have all of that, and more, a life we can’t even imagine yet. But only if we go back.”

The other Quentin had started to cry. “I can’t,” he said, “I can’t—”

“You can,” Quentin insisted, “because if you’re me, that also means I’m you, and because we’re not going to be doing it alone, and—”

“No,” the other said, shaking his head, “no, I mean—it isn’t just a binding spell. I—I cast the binding, and some of what I bound was me but there was all this other stuff—this other shit that made up our essence, or whatever—and I thought—I thought you might come back for it and I didn’t know what kind of magic you might have if you made it here alive so I, I took it and I—” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a little brown leather satchel. “I broke it. I smashed it. So that even if you had some way to get me, you’d never—you’d never make it back.” Looking miserable he offered Quentin the bag. “I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry—”

Quentin took it and opened it wide enough to peer inside: shards of glass, some as small as grains of sand, strangely catching the light that wasn’t there. He laughed. “Sorry for this?”

“It’s gone,” said the other miserably. “It won’t work there anymore. We can’t go back in one piece.”

“No, this is—you’ve got this,” Quentin said. “Look, you shattered it, but you kept it, too. You could have thrown it in the river, or buried it in the dirt, and you didn’t. Because you were scared I’d come back, but—some part of you wanted me to. And this?” He gestured at the pieces. “Come on. This is just some minor mending. You know how to do that.” He held the bag back out and the other Quentin took it, looking doubtful. “You’ve got this,” Quentin repeated. “Once you start it’ll be like breathing. All you have to do is want it to be whole.”

The other Quentin nodded slightly and Quentin had the strange sense of feeling for him a kind of tender pride. Is this who I am, he wondered, along with everything else, is some part of me someone who says yes to what feels insurmountable… He watched himself ready his hands to cast and then hesitate. “What about—after, what if I don’t know how to live anymore, what if I just fuck up your shit and ruin everything again, I mean what am I supposed to _do_ —”

“You don’t need to do anything,” Quentin said. “Just be.” And following the impulse of a dream he pulled himself close like Eliot might pull him close, and squeezed his hand like Julia might squeeze his hand.

The other Quentin took a deep breath. “Okay. Okay.” Again he positioned his hands.

Quentin was right: he barely had to move them and the pieces began swirling in mid-air, looking for the places they were meant to connect, seeking their own wholeness, remembering what it was not to be alone—the storm was easing and the clouds were drifting lazily apart and the pieces were shining iridescent in the moonlight—little clusters welcoming their missing parts, nestling back into where they belonged, radiating as they grew a strange and brilliant light—the rain had stopped and the night was suddenly clear and Quentin could feel unfurling streaks of desire and grief and rage and joy and love—there was so _much_ of him that he felt he was seeing for the first time—he could barely make out anymore the outlines of the small object taking shape in the center of the ball of light and it kept changing as it grew—a bird’s nest—a waterfall—a cluster of vines reaching towards the sun—the world around him was disappearing into the light and his other self lingered barely visible as an outline beneath it and Quentin could feel the lightness of body that portended waking and in the last moments— _oh_ , he thought— _oh, it’s beautiful_ — _and always was_ —

*

Quentin was awake. Opening his eyes he saw the pebbled white of the ceiling in the room in Whitespire lit in the soft light of early morning. He breathed in and felt the air passing the back of his throat as his lungs expanded and the cool silk sheets under the skin of his fingers and the denim of the jeans he’d slept in snagging coarsely by now against the hair of his legs and sleep digging into the corners of his eyes and—he was _awake_.

He turned to see beside the bed the comforting triptych of Margo sitting ramrod straight with Eliot and Josh dozing each on one shoulder. It struck Quentin that this was the perfect encapsulation of Margo, of her will and her force and how freely she lent them to those she loved, and he was overcome briefly by how grateful he was to know her; by how deeply he appreciated Josh’s loyalty; by Eliot, Eliot, Eliot… He looked so lovely with his eyes closed and his cheek against her that Quentin almost didn’t want Margo to wake him up. But she was watching him with her brow furrowed and after what seemed a moment of disbelief she inhaled sharply and said “Quentin—El, El wake up, he’s back—”

Quentin watched Eliot stir softly, lashes batting half-open, frowning against the light until the moment he woke enough for her words to penetrate at which point he sat up like he’d been electrocuted, looking at Quentin like there was nothing else in the room. “Q—oh my god—you’re—are you—”

“Welcome back, dude,” said Josh, putting his glasses on. “It’s been six days, we were getting worried. Did it work?”

“ _Something_ fucking happened,” Margo said, looking disquieted. “It was like—watching an eclipse that became a supernova, but one that was also childbirth?”

Quentin couldn’t find words. He sat up, feeling every shift of muscle and bone, remembering what it was to breathe, taking in the room, its high walls, the wooden posters of the bed, the pointed arches of the windows and outside the day impossibly blue and somewhere a bird singing… On the other side of the bed sat Julia poised and tense and as soon as she caught his eye she exhaled. “It did, didn’t it?” she said, breaking into a teary-eyed smile. “It worked. You’re—all you. All here.”

“Yeah,” he said finally. Then he laughed a little, and grinned, and started to cry. “Yeah, I’m here.”

“Thank god,” Eliot said.

“Thank _fucking_ god,” Margo said.

“Q, I…” Julia trailed off. She wiped her eyes and laughed disbelievingly. 

Quentin drank in the sight of her, feeling for what he thought might be the first time the depth and sweetness of her love. “Jules,” he said. There would be so much to tell her later, so much he wanted to say. He shook himself a bit. “I’m here,” he said again, as though there was something new to be discovered in it. And wasn’t there? Wasn’t there always, as long as he remained…

“Are you okay?” said Josh.

“How do you feel?” said Julia.

“What do you need?” said Margo.

“What do you want?” said Eliot.

“I…” Quentin took in their questions, starting with the first because it seemed simplest. “I’m okay.” But then— “Or, I’m not okay, but I think I will be. Or, or maybe I won’t ever be, like, just okay, or all the way okay, but it’s okay because part of me is, and I’m—more okay than before, or I’m—figuring out what okay even means, or I’m—I’m _alive_ —I’m fucking alive and I feel—amazing, and awful, and terrified, and excited, and—I’m a total fucking mess and the happiest I’ve ever been, and I—I need to talk to Fogg about re-enrolling, I think, and I need to call that psychiatrist and make an appointment, and I need to eat something—god, I’m fucking _starving_ —I need to eat something and when we get back to Earth I want to go to a fucking diner, like a real old-school one, and I wanna get a black-and-white milkshake and one of those, the breakfast thing with like, the pancakes and the eggs and sausage and everything—the lumberjack, that’s it—and then I want—god,” and he started to laugh and couldn’t stop laughing, his joy bubbling out of him like a spring, “then we should throw a fucking party, like a huge one, and invite everyone we know, to celebrate, because, guys, I don’t know if you know this, but I came back from the fucking dead.”

*

“Jesus fuck,” Alice said.

“Yeah,” Quentin said. He had just finished catching her up on the metaphysics of recent events and was giving her a chance to absorb it before he moved into more personalized topics.

“I mean…” She shook her head slowly. “Jesus _fucking fuck_.”

“Pretty much,” he agreed, and took a bite of his ice cream. They were at some specialty local chain Alice had wanted to try, nearly empty in the cold weather, where she had ordered one scoop of what appeared to be a deconstructed Rice Krispies Treat and another of something that looked like a birthday cake had fucked a pretzel. Quentin had opted for half peppermint with brownies, half some unnamed off-vanilla flavor smashed with miscellaneous breakfast cereals. It tasted disgusting and amazing. Lately he had been craving foods like this all the time, things that maxed out the taste buds and reminded one of the sheer G-rated pleasures of being a human being with a tongue: curries marked with four peppers on the menu, sushi platters offering a dozen different fish, burgers dripping cheese and grease served with fries dusted with salt, gourmet donuts the size of his face filled with jam or cream…. The other day he and Julia had gone to a new Mexican place her friend had recommended and when he bit into a nacho bearing guacamole he had moaned.

“So…” Alice blinked a few times as though to reset herself. “So how are you doing now? Are you—are you better, or—?”

“I’m—better, yeah,” he said. He hesitated before going on, not wanting to derail the conversation before what he most needed to tell her. But it felt incomplete to leave it there. “It feels weird to say that, because—I mean I’m not puking every time I have a new experience, or whatever, which is cool. But—I guess I always thought there was, you know, fucked up and okay, and you were one or the other, and usually I was fucked up. And I still—I’m still pretty fucked up. I mean I’m seeing this new therapist, a magician, and I feel like every time I start to talk about one way I’m fucked up I find this total other way I hadn’t even thought of. But at the same time—I’m not running anymore. And that’s—new.”

“That’s good,” she said, her eyes shining behind her glasses. “I’m really happy for you.”

“Thanks,” he said. He gave it a moment to see if she had anything else to say and when she didn’t he took a deep breath. This was the difficult part. “So—so when I was—beyond, or whatever, and I was finding the rest of me, I—I got my memories back. Of—of what happened before I died. And, uh—so I remember it now, and—”

“We’re not getting back together,” Alice cut in.

Quentin startled. “Wait—I mean yes—but—wait, what?”

“I mean you would have led with that,” she explained. “If that’s what you wanted. So if you’re nervous about how to break the news that you remember getting back together but still want to stay broken up—I mean, you can relax about it.” She flashed a tight smile which nonetheless felt genuine. “I didn’t come here secretly hoping for that.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well that—that helps some.” He was flooded with appreciation for her smarts and her bluntness and how well she knew him and how little she cared about following the rules. “But I do… I still….” He kept his eyes trained down, feeling slightly cowardly but trying to focus on getting through it. “So, yeah, I remember getting back together, and—when I said I trusted you, that was real. That couldn’t not be real. I mean it’s you and me and there was always going to be an expiration date on how long I could keep actually wanting to push you away. And I—I felt like you had this idea, of what you wanted us to be, and I don’t—I didn’t really want that, but I couldn’t—it was such a messed up time, it was like I didn’t—I didn’t have the energy to argue. Not that I’m saying it would have been an argument—it was just, okay, in or out, that was what I could handle, and given those options, in was better than out, and whatever that meant to you, fine, and maybe—shit, maybe it would make me feel better, to act like things were back how they’d been, but that’s not—that’s not the same as feeling the way you felt, or the way I used to feel, and I—look I really went back and forth about whether to tell you this, because maybe you’re just sitting there thinking I’m being a dick, and just—hurting you to clear my conscience, or whatever, but it’s not—we said that we wanted to be friends and I still want that, a lot, I still really want that, and I know that might sound weird because I’m like maybe actively tanking my chances of you ever wanting to talk to me again, which I get, but—it just felt dishonest, to try to be your friend knowing that I kind of—used you in this weird way. I wanted… I wanted to give you a chance to have, like, informed consent, I guess. So you can really decide—so you know exactly who it is you’re being friends with. I didn’t want to have our fresh start have this big secret behind it.” He exhaled through his mouth. “Also I’m dating Eliot, which—I really would rather have that just like, come up naturally, but, I don’t know, rip the band-aid, or something. I don’t—I don’t know if this was the right call, but—I tried.”

He looked at her then, her mouth in a thin line and her shoulders tense but—she didn’t look angry, he thought. If she were angry, he would know it.

It took her a minute to respond during which he forced himself to stay silent waiting for her to take the time she needed. “It does hurt,” she said finally. “To hear it. But you were right to tell me. And I—” She hesitated. “Look, you were dead a while, and we weren’t speaking for a while, and I’ve had—a lot of time to think about you, and us, and—I think I kind of knew. Even back then, I think a part of me knew, but I just—wanted it so badly to be real, and like you said everything was so totally fucked—and with me, you know… I don’t really know if what I was feeling was wanting to be with you or just wanting to be the girl you had fallen in love with, the one who hadn’t fucked so many people’s shit. Like if I could get back with you, that would prove I was still good, or redeemed, or—whatever. But that’s not me anymore, and—that’s not you either, so.” She licked a bit of her ice cream about to drip down her cone and Quentin felt the relief settling into him. “So we both fucked up, at a really fucked up time, and we both regret it, and I feel like—that’s not a crime. It doesn’t have to be this unforgivable thing. You—Jesus Christ, Q, you made me human again. If I could forgive you for _that_ …”

Quentin laughed in surprise. “That is _not_ where I was expecting that to go.”

“Well, and I’m really grateful for it, _now_ ,” she said. “But being human sucks so much. It took me a long time to remember that it’s also got its upsides.”

“Yeah,” he said, “that sounds right. Sucks unbelievably much, but also, ice cream. Friendship. The little things.” He smiled at her.

“Ice cream is _not_ a little thing,” she said, smiling back.

It felt—it felt good, it felt so good, sitting here with Alice, the two of them after everything they’d been and broken ready to begin building something new, so good for a moment he was too overwhelmed to speak. And he could have left it there, moved right into asking her to fill him in on her life, but— “There’s one more thing,” he said. “If that’s okay.”

“Yeah,” she said, “of course. What is it?”

“When we were talking, a while ago…” He tried to gather the words. “We were talking about when I died, and I was telling you—what I’d heard about it, and you…. You had this look, like there was something you weren’t saying. Did—I mean you were with me, at the Seam. You—you saw me hesitate, you saw me cast—did you know?”

Alice bit her lip. “I—I didn’t _know_ —it all happened so fast, and I mean I could barely even process what I’d seen… so I wasn’t sure. About anything. But I—” She shrugged. “I know you. And I know—I know what it’s like, to just—be in that moment that feels like the end, and think—thank god it’s over, but also—fuck it, I’m gonna make it count.”

Quentin remembered that day in the clearing, Alice casting and casting and casting herself into no longer being Alice. What she had said right after: _I did it on purpose_. He had never asked her if that had been true and it hadn’t occurred to him until now that in all likelihood she would have the same answer he did: I did, I didn’t, I had to, I wanted, it happened, I made it… None of them quite true or untrue, each of them real. “God. Yeah. That—that makes sense.”

“I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “I feel like I keep saying that, like somehow it’s going to mean something different. I guess I mean me too. I’m glad I’m here, to—be alive with you, or—whatever. I don’t usually think of it that way. But maybe I should. I don’t know. It’s hard, you know? Feeling like—I’m an adult, or I’m supposed to be, but I’m still—having to find all these new ways to be.”

“I do know,” Quentin said. “And it is hard. And I think—on the one hand maybe it’s always going to be hard, and on the other hand, I’m throwing a party, so, you know, anything is possible.”

Alice raised her eyebrows in amusement. “Wow, okay. Maybe miracles do happen.”

“Well, jointly throwing,” he amended. “Co-throwing. And Kady’s hosting, but—it _was_ my idea, so I think I get credit, still. Anyway you’re like, super invited, obviously. Hang on, Eliot got really into—this calligraphy spell—” He reached into his messenger bag and pulled out the invitation he’d saved for her.

She read it quickly. Her mouth quirked. “Undeathday Party?”

Quentin rolled his eyes. “Julia thought it needed a name. Anyway if you can come—it’d be great to see you there.”

“Yeah, okay,” she said. “Sounds fun.”

He tilted his head. “Really?”

She laughed. “No. But—new things, right?”

“New things,” he echoed. “New things with old friends.”

“Now you made it corny,” she said, and Quentin grinned.

*

The party was a hit. Julia hung fairy lights around the penthouse spelled to blink in time with the beat of whatever was blaring from the speakers; Margo took on stocking the bar and curating the selection of mixers, with an assist from Kady who volunteered to make mulled cider. Josh and Eliot collaborated on the snack menu, with Josh bringing sweet and Eliot in charge of savory. Frankie arrived having stumbled on an abandoned crate of Patrón on his way over which he was happy to donate to the cause. Fen took a night off to let Margo dress her up in Earth clothes and looked surprisingly sophisticated though only from the neck down, having insisted on applying her own glitter eyeshadow. Todd brought a woman no one in attendance had seen before and Penny surreptitiously started a pool for “Girlfriend or Hot Cousin?” Poppy made her way in for an hour early in the night despite not having been invited but behaved herself with uncharacteristic restraint, showing off her admittedly adorable fat-cheeked baby and exiting gracefully before bedtime.

There were people he knew and people he barely knew and people he’d never met and Kady kept the lights dimmed and Eliot kept the music loud. Even though it had been his idea Quentin was nervous, with a little constant flutter in his stomach and the occasional question about where to put his hands. He chatted awkwardly with a Brakebills third-year about her thesis, on improving standard methods of measuring the toxicity of cursed objects; he tried the cider and found it unsurprisingly worthy of Kady’s hype but kept himself to two mugfulls; he ate half a dozen miniature cupcakes and an obscene quantity of chips with Eliot’s onion dip. He was glad to be there, he realized maybe an hour in, with a flicker of surprise. At one point he felt a familiar self-consciousness creeping on him and instead of looking for a place to hide he found his way back to Eliot, who snaked a welcoming arm around his back without interrupting the anecdote he was telling about trying to modernize opinions on footwear in the Fillorian court. Quentin let himself sink a little against him, half-listening to the story he’d heard before, taking a moment just to watch: Frankie and Josh sharing stories of waking up in unexpected locations, Harriet dishing old FuzzBeat gossip while one of Kady’s hedge friends translated, Margo distracting Todd while Penny attempted recon on Girlfriend or Hot Cousin, Julia and Alice talking theory by the punch bowl.

“But Popper never _read_ McCullough,” Alice was saying. “So while the Fabian Conjecture holds true assuming the constancy of meridian flow, it’s an open question still as to whether or to what degree it’s relevant in pockets of distortion.”

“Right,” Julia said, “and what I’m saying is that if you take Vygotsky—”

“Oh shit—the Moscow Hypothesis—”

“— _exactly_ —the Moscow Hypothesis lays out a framework for predicting the alterations and variations, which has never been tested because of the dangers associated with known locales, but I’ve been looking into some old maps of _Fillory_ , and I think—”

“No nerd shit at the party, house rules,” Kady broke in, carrying shot glasses containing something neon green. “Penalty for violation is a jello shot apiece.” Julia rolled her eyes and Alice made a face but each of them obliged.

Eliot gave him an affectionate squeeze around the waist, his audience having drifted off to acquire another round. “You having a good time?”

“Yeah,” said Quentin, “I am.” He smiled up at Eliot, letting himself enjoy the novelty of it.

“Good,” Eliot said, and placed a brief kiss on his forehead.

They hadn’t been hiding but it struck Quentin that this was their first time being somewhere as a couple, a phrase which made him blush a little to apply to himself. It shouldn’t have mattered, he thought, after everything they’d been to each other and survived together. Then he remembered what Eliot had said about all the years he’d spent flinching away from precisely these moments of unremarkable joining and thought that maybe it did matter. He caught not for the first time that evening a handful of surprised glances and was startled and a bit embarrassed to feel a pleasurable rush at the reaction: _that’s right_ , a part of him wanted to say, _Eliot Waugh picked me_. Out loud he said, “I think people think you’re settling.” He waggled his eyebrows so Eliot would know he didn’t care.

“Mm,” Eliot sighed through pursed lips, “I’ve gotten _so_ spoiled about being able to throw traitors in the dungeon. Come, let’s find someone to show you off to. Have you met Amelia? We had first-year astronomy together, trauma-bonded for life over those fucking problem sets.”

Together with Julia they stayed late past when everyone else had left to help Kady clean up before taking a cab back to the apartment at Central Park West, which was not and would never quite be a home but for which Quentin had developed a deep affection. It was a place like their imagined Fillory which he and Julia had filled in with their friendship; it was in some sense the place where he had remembered who he was and opened the door to love and saved his own life.

“It’s been kind of a big month for me,” he said to Eliot as they were winding down to sleep, feeling safe and contented curled into Eliot with Eliot’s arms around his waist.

Eliot laughed into the back of his neck. “That’s the fucking understatement of the year.”

In the morning he woke to Eliot nosing against his stomach and propped himself halfheartedly up on his elbows. “Oh so this is—happening—”

Eliot looked up at him and Quentin was stunned by the complexities of his face, how his eyes were at once sweet and dangerous and playful and fond. “I can wait,” Eliot said. “If you want.”

“I didn’t say _that_ ,” Quentin said. “It might just take me a few minutes to wake— _oh_ —okay yeah I’m awake now— _fuck_ , El—” And he collapsed back onto the bed, moving his hand to thread his fingers in Eliot’s hair, just to feel him there under his palm, saying his name again and again because it was a thrill that had not worn off to be able to call this name and have it mean what it now meant.

He came almost stupidly quickly in Eliot’s hot wonderful mouth and lay on his back for a moment speechless. “I’m gonna need a minute before returning the favor,” he managed to say.

“You don’t have to,” Eliot said, batting his eyes.

“El,” Quentin said, “I want to, you know I fucking want to, just—damn—that’s a lot for first thing in the morning.” He patted the bed next to him. “Come on, come up here.”

In their quiet moments together with only each other and their love to keep them company, Quentin felt awed still by the hugeness of it, not just the soft gift of Eliot’s care but the expanse of his own love, how it filled him up and kept growing and yet how easily he found he could hold it. “I’ve never—” he started, hesitated, went on because he loved too the way they each seized chances to be brave for each other, how badly they wanted to do this right, “I’ve never felt like this before, where I was—like before when I was into someone, there was always this layer of like, terror, or anxiety, or—I felt like I was just waiting out the days until I’d fuck it up or they’d figure me out and it would be over. And I guess I just assumed that’s how it would always be for me. But El, I’m so fucking in love with you and I don’t—I don’t feel that at all. It just feels—good.”

Eliot traced a slow line up and down his back. “Good.”

“And the thing is, it’s not about—I mean it _is_ about you, of course it’s about you—but I think it’s about me too, because it’s not just—it’s not just us,” he said. “I feel—different, and it feels weird to say that because I’m still, you know, me, and I’m still a mess in a lot of different ways. I’m still—I thought I was going to like, ease back into therapy but every single time I go I’m crying in like ten minutes. There’s a lot of shit up there. But then, also, last night I had _actual fun_ , at a _party_ , which is—I can’t even put into words how unprecedented that is. So like I’m still fucked up but—I always thought the goal was to be less fucked up. And I mean, that kind of still is the goal, long-term. But it’s like, I used to think it was this zero-sum thing, but right now I’m so fucked up but then sometimes I feel—I feel _so_ good, like I didn’t know I could feel this good. Sometimes I feel just— _right_ , and excited about my life, and—happy. And when that happens, I’m not spending every second waiting for it to be over. I can just—be there, and be—happy, for however long it lasts.”

Eliot tightened his hold on him a little, guiding him to bury his face in the crook of Eliot’s neck. It felt good to be there, to be held, to breathe him in. To know that it wouldn’t always be like this but this moment was real. “I want all of that for you so much,” Eliot said, pulling back. “And not just because Margo and I had a really inspired idea about New Year’s. But, Q, you deserve it. You deserve to feel good and more.”

“I think I might be starting to believe that,” Quentin said. “I’m not—I wouldn’t even say I don’t hate myself anymore, because that’s still there, in places I didn’t even know about, like a—mold, or like a reflex. But I can kind of—step back and see it happening now, because—I’m not fighting myself, mostly. Mostly I feel like, I’m on my own side. And I’m not—I’m not scared of myself anymore.” It was so strange to live like that, after all those years.

“Q,” Eliot said, gently cupping his cheek. He was looking at Quentin like—Quentin didn’t have a word for it. Something tender and living and filled with light. Quentin liked it, whatever it was.

He kissed Eliot, slowly and deeply, sinking his fingers into his hair. He had intended it as a gesture of affection but he got carried away, pressing his body close, letting his hand roam down Eliot’s side, maneuvering so that he was straddling Eliot whose hands were resting on Quentin’s hips. “Your turn,” he said, sitting back, “if you’re up for it.”

“You know I’m up for it,” Eliot said, almost distractedly, like he was too busy eyeing Quentin up and down to pay attention to what he was saying.

This was something else new: how nakedly Eliot admired whatever it was he saw when he looked at Quentin like this, and how wild it made Quentin feel, to see Eliot’s desire for him written on his face. He wondered if it was true as it seemed that no one had ever looked at him like that before, or if he had never allowed himself to be so looked at. He thought about telling Eliot _I like it when you look at me_ and let himself feel a little dizzy with the thought of it, how pleased Eliot would be to hear that his appreciation was reverberating in Quentin, what he might say or do in response, and then he put the thought to the side and began kissing his way down Eliot’s chest, his heart humming with the sureness that they would have time.

*

“So I was thinking with how many credits I have left,” Quentin said, “I could come back for the spring term part-time, and use the reduced schedule to start working on my thesis.”

Dean Fogg nodded. “Do you have a topic in mind?”

“Yeah, it’s—I’m not ready to draft a proposal just yet,” Quentin said, “but I was thinking about doing something on the philosophy of magic, maybe taking a cross-cultural, comparative approach. Looking at—the underlying assumptions of the classical school of thought, all the canonical scholars of theory, and then identifying other perspectives that might challenge or complicate some of those assumptions. I don’t know if Julia’s talked to you yet, but I know she’s thinking of doing hers on collaborative magic, and we had talked about maybe applying for a travel grant for the summer to do some fieldwork together. I know that usually thesises—theses?—papers are more directly connected to your discipline, but I was looking at the requirements online and it seems like that’s more tradition than anything else. Or, I could look for a way to incorporate it into the practical component.”

“It’s unconventional,” said Fogg, “and likely to skew more theoretical than we usually expect of students at the master’s level. But it’s well within the bounds of academic expectations, and in fact I think it will play nicely to your strengths.”

“Thank you,” Quentin said, surprised to receive something so close to a compliment. It was odd once again to be sitting with Henry Fogg on opposite sides of the desk at which he had once felt his life begin. Now he felt a similar rush of newness but he thought he understood finally that it was not that his life was beginning for the first time but rather that life was always beginning, for him and everyone else. What a gift. He hoped he would remember it.

“I’ll let the registrar’s office know I’ve approved your return,” Fogg said. “I’ll have to look into the rooming situation—you may wind up somewhere other than the Physical Cottage for a semester. Is there anything else?”

Quentin hesitated, shoring up his nerve. “Actually there is,” he said. “I, uh—I started seeing a psychiatrist recently, and I’m—I’m trying medication as a treatment option again, and we’re still—monitoring the dosage, and it might change, and I don’t know if it’s going to be a forever thing, or if someday in the future I might taper off, or—but for the time being, I’m going to stay on it.”

“Okay,” Fogg said slowly. “And is there a reason you are sharing with me your personal medical information?”

“Because,” Quentin said, “I think—I think you, or like, Brakebills as an institution, should really reconsider the message you’re putting out to incoming students, about medication. Because you’re getting these, like, pretty young people, and, and the ones it’s most relevant for I think are really vulnerable, and susceptible to just—kind of taking your word as authoritative—and I don’t want to, like, I accept responsibility for my decision because I know, I know you never said it was a requirement, but at the same time you really made it sound like an expectation, and I just think—”

“Quentin,” Fogg interrupted, “and I don’t mean this rudely, but what on earth are you talking about?”

“What—at my interview,” he said. “You said—you said everybody medicates but you hope here they won’t need to—I handed over my prescriptions—do you—do you not remember this?”

Fogg inhaled sharply through his nose. “Oh, fuck me.”

Quentin studied him, concerned. “Did you… forget your own school’s policy… sir?”

Fogg shook his head. “It was never a Brakebills policy,” he said, closing his eyes briefly. “It was Jane Chatwin’s idea.”

“Jane Chatwin,” Quentin echoed blankly.

“The Beast had found a way to expedite his encroach into our world,” Fogg said. “Several timelines in a row had simply been a bloodbath because he managed to arrive before you had anything whatsoever in the way of tools to protect yourself. No matter how we structured your training, there simply wasn’t time. And—”

“Magic comes from pain,” Quentin filled in. His brain felt like it was short-circuiting.

Fogg pressed his lips together. “An oversimplification, and one I’ve been wondering about the use of. But, yes. Jane had looked into the historical record and found—precedent, of sorts. Fourteenth-century monastic cults, for example, with particularly brutal initiation rites, who reported feats from new members that should have been shocking for magicians with so little training to pull off. Customs around military conscription in ancient Sparta, where young men regularly threw battle magic at opponents. There’s never been reason to believe that such a regimen impacts overall magical potential, and the development of a mature magician comes down of course to talent and discipline. But for novices, the evidence was there. As hard as I am sure it must be to believe, we were trying to help you.”

Quentin could not begin to process this information. “Did it work?”

Fogg smiled, a little sadly. “It did. Well enough in timeline thirty-nine that it inspired her to suggest keeping Julia out of Brakebills in the next one. I very much wish now for both your sakes we had found some other way for you to defeat the Beast.”

“And—after?” Quentin said, anger rising. “I mean, you never thought to tell me? The Beast was dead and I was living here and you never—”

“It has been,” said Fogg, “as I’m sure you’ll remember, a busy several years. To say the least.”

Quentin stared, dumbfounded. “This was my _life._ ”

“And I do hope you will safeguard it better than I have,” said Fogg. “And I can assure you this has oversight has been duly added to the landfill of regrets which I will take to my grave.”

“That’s not good enough,” Quentin said. “I could have—I _did_ —do you have any idea—”

“No,” said Fogg. “I won’t insult you by pretending I do.”

“I…” But he realized there was nothing to say. There was nothing that would return those years, and if he was being honest as poorly as Fogg had acted there was no guarantee he would have maintained treatment better that time than any of the other times he had slipped out of it for reasons he was only starting to understand. He had been so glad, he remembered now, to hear Fogg give him a reason not to need it. He made a mental note to talk about this with his therapist. “I’ll see you at the start of term, I guess.”

“I _am_ sorry, Quentin,” said Fogg.

“Yeah,” Quentin said. “Me too.” He got up to leave but paused as a thought struck him by the door. “If you did want to make it up to me,” he said over his shoulder, “not that you really can, but you could see about me and Julia getting that travel grant.”

“All requests must go through the application process,” Fogg said. Then the corner of his mouth twisted into something that was almost like a smile. “But I’ll see what I can do.”

*

The plan was to head up early on a Friday so they would have the weekend to settle in. But on the morning they had gathered their things Quentin realized he could not yet go back to school. “Wait, Jules,” he said, “there’s something I need to do first.”

He told her what he was thinking.

“I totally get it,” she said. “Do you want me to come with you?”

“No, it’s fine, I don’t want to derail your plans,” he said; then he thought about it and said, “Actually—if you wouldn’t mind—I’d really like it if you came.”

“Of course,” she said, smiling.

So they took the subway down to Port Authority and drank bad coffee in the waiting area for New Jersey Transit. On the train they talked about the new semester and their summer plans; Julia had heard from Kady of a coven in Maine that might be worth visiting for both their purposes. Now that he no longer needed Brakebills to be anything but what it was, Quentin found that he was happy to look forward to new spells and unfamiliar challenges, to the prospect of making something he could be proud of. He was grateful for another year and a half of structure in which he could practice imagining his life—glad that it was coming and glad that it would end, anxious and excited about the after he couldn’t yet see.

The cemetery was nearly empty and pretty enough; there was a light dusting of snow on the grass that elsewhere had melted. Quentin had never been there so it took some time to find the right spot and when he did he placed the flowers he had bought by the lonely headstone and stood for a minute simply taking it in.

“It’s weird,” he said. “I mean, we’ve _been_ to the Underworld, we know how it works—I kind of personally know more about death than any human alive—but there’s still a part of me that’s watched that scene in every movie and feels like—maybe he could hear me.”

“We were only in the Underworld for a little while,” said Julia. “It’s huge, we probably saw a fraction of a percent of what goes on there. And it’s just a waystation—whatever happens after that, even the fairies barely understand. So, who knows? Besides… it’s not really about him, right?”

“No,” Quentin said. “You’re right.” He took a shaky breath. “Hi, Dad.”

“So, I didn’t really plan this in advance, but I guess I’ll start with—I’m sorry I wasn’t there, at the end. It was—not my choice, but I wish…” He closed his eyes. “ _God_ , I fucking wish things had gone differently. I wish a lot of things, I wish I’d called more, I wish I’d visited more often. I wish I’d told you I loved you more. I wish I’d shown you more magic. I wish I’d listened, when you said you wanted to fix things between us. I was so convinced that everything about me was unfixable, and—I think you tried anyway, and honestly I think I kind of tried too, but—I wish I’d tried harder, or done more. I guess that’s what people always wish, after.”

“You used to say,” he went on, “that all you wanted was for me to be happy, and I gave you… so much shit for that, my god. I acted like I could tell you were lying, but really I think… I think I believed you, and that freaked me out. Because I thought _happy_ was the one thing I couldn’t be, and that’s why—that’s why you always sounded so sad, when you said it. So, you said the thing that parents are supposed to say, and you actually meant it, but instead of _I want you to be happy_ all I heard was _I want a different kid_. And I’m—sorry, about that.”

“I never really thought about if _you_ were happy.” His voice had begun to waver. “Probably most kids don’t think like that about their parents, until…. But I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately, and I’ve been—missing you, so much, and—when I look back, I kind of don’t think you were happy. And I felt for so long like that was my fault, and, I mean, I know I wasn’t always an easy kid. But now I feel like, maybe you just never really figured it out. So maybe that’s what was hard for you. That you wanted me to be happy, and you felt like—you couldn’t show me how, because you didn’t know.”

He had begun to cry and took a moment to collect himself without trying to stop. It felt right in a terrible way to weep at last at his father’s grave. Julia brushed her hand against his and he locked their fingers together, holding on tight. “So I wanted to tell you that—look, things are still hard for me, and they’re probably always going to be,” he said. “But I’m—I’m working on it now, like really working on it, not just going to therapy and taking my meds and, whatever, eating three meals a day, but also just—things are going to get fucked up at some point and when that happens I’m not going stop trying. I really—believe that now. Because I’m—learning. I always thought that life was this thing that hurts, and it does, but it’s other things too, and I’m really trying to learn what those are. And I—I got lucky, because I found people I can learn from. People who can show me how to be happy.”

“I mean—” He smiled a little through his tears. “Julia’s stuck around, thank god, because I don’t know where I would fucking be without her. I know you always liked her. We had some rough patches, but we’re really good now. It’s kind of like with you, where it—it took me a long time to just—hear it when she said she cared about me, and I’m—honestly I’m still working on that, but it’s—better.” Next to him he could feel as much as see Julia’s small sad smile. “And then there’s Eliot—god, I wish you could have met Eliot. And I wish he could have met you, because I think it would have been really nice for him, to have a dad in his life who wasn’t a complete piece of shit. If you’d met Eliot—honestly,” he laughed, “I think you would have been a little confused at first, because I don’t think you’d ever met anyone like him. I don’t think you really let yourself live a life where you might. But Eliot is like, he’s the most charming person, and I think within an hour you would have been a huge fan. And he makes me really happy, so. You would have liked him for that, too.”

“I guess that’s what I wanted you to know,” he finished. “That I’m sorry, and I love you, and I’m figuring it out, and I’m not doing it alone. So—you don’t have to worry about me anymore, okay?”

He stood for a long time listening to the silence and reading the inscription on the stone and letting the first tears he had shed for his father fall down his cheeks, stinging cold in the winter breeze. There would be more, he knew; he was at the beginning. In this as in everything. It would hurt and he would live and when he thought about his dad he would remember him with sorrow and with joy. That was what he wanted: not to erase his grief but to hold space alongside it for the soft beautiful glow of having been loved. To carry it all, as he finally trusted himself to do.

“I really fucking love you, Jules,” he said.

“I love you too, Q,” she said.

He squeezed her hand.

And together they walked out of the place of death to catch the train that would take them back to their lives.

**Author's Note:**

>  _You do not have to be good.  
>  You do not have to walk on your knees  
> for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.  
> You only have to let the soft animal of your body  
> love what it loves_  
> —Mary Oliver, "Wild Geese"
> 
> All the thanks in the world to Kat for getting me into this stupid show in the first place and being wildly encouraging of this project/catching my most embarrassing typos. [Here](https://youtu.be/IEqccPhsqgA) is the horse all the cool kids are putting in their latte foam. I am [on Tumblr](http://prettyboysdontlookatexplosions.tumblr.com) and would probably love to scream about this absurd show with you; [here](https://prettyboysdontlookatexplosions.tumblr.com/post/190036545501/fic-wild-geese) is a cleaned-up announcement post now that it's all done, if you want to reblog.


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